Thursday, June 1, 2006

Atheros, Broadcom Demonstrate 802.11n

Irvine-based Broadcom and Santa Clara-based Atheros announced the demonstration of interoperability of their 802.11n products yesterday, saying that the companies have completed joint interoperability testing between Broadcom and Atheros chipsets. Both companies are developing high speed, wireless LAN chips around the IEEE 802.11n draft specification, the next standard being developed for WiFi. The two companies said that they were able to show greater than 100 Megabits-per-second speeds in the demonstration. The two companies are trying to alleviate fears of incompatibility as manufacturers rush to ship pre-802.11n standard hardware to market; the two companies said they also expect to conduct tests with other manufacturers of 802.11n draft specification hardware. The 802.11n standards group has been hammering out differences in two competing specifications, the TGnSync and WWiSE proposals for boosing Wi-Fi speeds.

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