Redpine Signals, a leading supplier of wireless communications solutions, has announced the introduction of its Lite-MAX product – a semiconductor platform for mobile devices offering wireless connectivity conforming to the IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard. The Lite-MAX low-power mobile platform offers all features of the WiMAX Wave-2 profiles. Lite-MAX supports both single antenna and two antenna MIMO configurations and leverages advanced patent-pending performance enhancing and power saving techniques to deliver significantly improved battery life.
The Lite-MAX platform provides all the features essential for creating a mobile WiMAX subscriber unit, including a two-stream MIMO baseband, programmable MAC, integrated analog front-end and power management unit. Lite-MAX baseband supports all features of Wave-2 profiles and the platform supports profiles 1A and 1B in the 2.3 GHz band, and 3A in the 2.5 GHz band, operating at up to 1024 sub-carrier, 10 MHz bandwidth and includes MRC and MIMO in the downlink, HARQ, PUSC frequency diversity, AMC, beamforming, and advanced CTC decoding. Lite-MAX connects to a host processor through an SDIO, SPI, PCIe, or USB 2.0 host interface and comes with reference drivers for popular operating systems such as Windows XP, CE, and Linux. The Lite-MAX platform includes a separate RF transceiver from Maxim — the MAX2837.
Lite-MAX leverages the small-area, low-power MIMO decoder from Redpine’s 802.11n Maxi-Fi product line.
“We have addressed the issue of power consumption through three paths — increased wireless performance, a low-power MIMO decoder, and multi-thread processing in layer 2,” said Venkat Mattela, Redpine’s Chief Executive Officer. “Our participation in the WiMAX Forum’s Second Mobile WiMAX PlugFest in Malaga, Spain this week is aimed at introducing a unique, low-cost, convergence-ready solution that interoperates with other devices and equipment providing support for WiMAX Wave-2 profiles,” said Mr. Mattela. “The Lite-MAX platform uses the fundamental innovations the company has made in the OFDM-MIMO and low power technology areas and proven in its WiFi products. It incorporates multiple patent-pending techniques to reduce average system power independent of any silicon geometry selected for the under-lying implementation,” he added.
“We have worked with Redpine during the last few years to provide total solutions in 802.11a/b/g/n that differentiate in performance and power” said Walter Lau, Business Manager in the Wireless Communications Group at Maxim Integrated Products. “We are continuing our cooperation in providing an outstanding RF solution to the Lite-MAX platform. MAX2837 is a high-performance, fully integrated Zero-IF transceiver operating in the 2.3-2.7 GHz band that supports all modes and bandwidths up to 1024 FFT and 28 MHz, respectively. MAX2837’s outstanding performance – a Receiver EVM of -33 dBc and noise figure of 2.5 dB – maximizes total system sensitivity, range, and throughput while consuming only 250mW of power.” he added.
The MAC functionality in Lite-MAX that includes burst management, sleep modes, classification, policing, traffic shaping, security management, and link control, is uniquely carried out in one thread of the integrated multi-threaded processor, leaving the other thread for protocol processing, real-time control, and HARQ processing, thus leading to a zero-host load architecture when a WiMAX interface is added to a mobile platform.
“With more than 30 companies participating in this latest mobile WiMAX Forum PlugFest, there is strong momentum and a clear commitment by the WiMAX ecosystem,” said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum. “By the contributions of Redpine Signals and the other PlugFest participants, these WiMAX Forum interoperability events continue to show a significant leap ahead with maturity of mobile WiMAX products. Additionally, the experience gained at these PlugFests is critical to improve quality of interoperability testing and to maintain our accelerated path to WiMAX Forum Certification.”
The Lite-MAX platform is available now to strategic partners to develop Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 profile end systems and silicon samples will be available in Q3 07.