Mobile Applications Board Demonstrating PCI-based Wi-Fi Module Mobile Applications Board Demonstrating 10/100/1G Ethernet

Intel

®

PXA Companion Device with PCI Controller

Wireless LAN 10/100/1G LAN In recent years, 802.11a/b/g has been established as the most common standard for broadband wireless data transfer. Originally designed for personal computers, 802.11a/b/g is currently moving into other application areas like video surveil- lance, IP phones, Point-of-Sale terminals and many more.The predominant interface on the 802.11a/b/g chipsets currently on the market is PCI, the standard bus in PC systems. High-end embedded microprocessors often have an integrated PCI interface that allows easy connection to standard 802.11a/b/g chipsets. However, many low cost or mobile processors do not have a built-in PCI inter- face. Instead, they support a processor-specific local bus or sometimes a memory interface. Currently there are no 802.11a/b/g chips available that can directly interface to these processor specific local busses. A bridge device is required to add wireless connectivity to a system with these processors. The QuickPCI Bridge Controller allows lever-aging the substantial investment into hardware, software and intellectual property already put into these systems. When one thinks ubiquitous, you cannot help but think of Ethernet. Ethernet (10/100/1G) is clearly the prevalent technology in the world’s networking backbone for Local Area Networks (LAN) and there is no indication that this will change any time soon. However, with the successful adoption of Ethernet into the networking arena, it is now also making its way into the embedded market.In doing so, it is facing various challenges in the embedded world not seen in the PC market—primarily, connectivity and power. Most embedded processors such as the Intel PXA processor, do not support the PCI interface that is most common in today’s LAN modules. However, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to support this for the embedded environment.QuickLogic has developed a low power bridging solution to address such challenges and provide a seamless solution to bridge from the Intel PXA processor to Intel Ethernet LAN controllers.