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More than 10 years ago, Ittiam, which focused on embedded media centric systems, believed that WiFi (News - Alert) would gain strong traction in the market and continued to invest heavily, and today this belief has come to fruition, according to reports from Wi-Fi alliance.

Wi-Fi Alliance (News - Alert), of which Ittiam is a member, indicates that shipments of WiFi devices reached nearly 1.1 billion in 2011 and this is expected to double by 2015.

According to Ittiam officials, the IP communications company has undergone many efforts to position itself as a leader in the W-Fi market. Ittiam's Wi-Fi Silicon IP has received strong traction in “consumer market based SOCs” leading to high volumes and it has been developing and licensing Wi-Fi IP for SOC, based on IEEE (News - Alert) 802.11a/b/g and 802.11b/g/n standards for a long time. Wireless LAN IP based SOCs are used in devices across a wide spectrum of industry.

Ittiam has partnered with Silvus Technologies, California, and now offers a broad suite of 802.11n. In the next phase of the partnership, the IP communications company is expected to independently address customer needs in 802.11n and 802.11ac.

To this end, it has made strong R&D investments. 802.11ac MAC is scheduled to be ready by end of 2012 followed by 802.11ac PHY in 2013. Ittiam is also exploring new technologies to exploit the TV Whitespace.

"We have had a successful partnership with Ittiam over the past five years to support SOC customers with MIMO technology. They are in a great position to successfully execute on this roadmap," said Babak Daneshrad, chairman at Silvus Technologies.

In addition, new features like WiFi direct and WiFi protected setup have been designed into several SOCs of customers in different countries, which are expected to release connectivity chips to market in 2012.

Cellular and consumer applications are seeing strong traction in 802.11b/g and single stream11n. Many companies have reportedly used Ittiam's Wi-Fi IP in their connectivity chip and released it for the cellular and consumer platforms.

Ittiam also works closely with the customers and gives suggestions about SOC architecture that is suitable for WiFi. It also has many filed and granted patents in this domain.