Wifi Revolution

Cortina Systems Inc. and Ralink Technology announced a new reference design powered by Cortina’s CS3516 Network Processor (News - Alert) and Ralink’s 802.11n WiFi solution RT2880. The companies have stated that they will showcase this design in the coming CEATEC in Japan.

 

Cortina Systems (News - Alert) is a supplier of intelligent communication solutions for the Core, Metro, Access, and Enterprise network market segments.

 

The Cortina Systems CS3516 Network Processor provides superior performance and functionality for Router Gateway (News - Alert), NAS, IP Set Top Box, VoIP, and other SME and SOHO applications. The device has a 32-bit ARM9 RISC Processor with up to 400 MIPS total performance. The device integrates a full-featured hardware crypto engine, two 10/100/1000 Ethernet MACs, dual USB 2.0 hosts or clients, dual IDE or SATA interfaces, a 66 MHz 32-bit PCI interface, and direct interfaces to color LCD and SLIC modules

 

Ralink (News - Alert) Technology Corporation is a developer of wireless LAN chipset solutions. They claim that their 802.11x chips are recognized for superior throughput, extended range, low-power consumption and consistent reliability demanded by Wi-Fi, mobile, and embedded applications.

 

“Consumers are finding new uses for networking in the digital home, such as networked picture frames, Internet radio and IP surveillance,” said Dr. Stewart Wu, vice president and general manager of Digital Home Business Unit, Cortina Systems. “OEMs are looking for integrated, high performance solutions. Working closely with Ralink, we are enabling system vendors quicker time to market for their network multimedia products with a comprehensive hardware and software reference design.”

 

According to officials, the reference design is supposed to offer 270 Mbps aggregate concurrent dual band throughput and up to 1 Gbps WAN-to-LAN routing wire-to-wire; and 200 Mbps wire-to-WiFi (News - Alert). It can be employed in apps like network picture frame, Internet radio, and NAS-based IP surveillance central stations as it has built in support for MPEG4, Motion JPEG, and MP3 decoding.

 

The reference board is based on the popular CS3516 Router Gateway NAS Reference Design Kit from Cortina and the RT2880 Reference Design Board from Ralink. The joint reference design includes an integrated Board Support Package that provides system designers a unified Linux kernel and application software suite.

 

While Ralink maintains that this is a step forward for them in providing advanced wireless LAN chipset solutions, they will continue to satisfy the high performance needs from the consumer and system manufacturers. For more info visit www.cortina-systems.com and www.ralinktech.com

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