Redpine Launches Low Power Mobile WiMAX Solution

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Wireless communications solutions supplier Redpine Signals Inc. has launched Lite-MAX, a semiconductor platform for mobile devices offering wireless connectivity conforming to the IEEE (News - Alert) 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 employs high performance enhancing and power saving techniques to enhance battery life, said the company.

 

The platform comprises a two-stream MIMO baseband, programmable MAC, integrated analog front-end and power management unit. It 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. Protocols include 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, MAX2837.

 

MAC functionality in Lite-MAX includes burst management, sleep modes, classification, policing, traffic shaping, security management, and link control. The functions are implemented in one thread of the integrated multi-threaded processor, freeing the other thread for protocol processing, real-time control, and HARQ processing. This leads to a zero-host load architecture when a WiMAX interface is added to a mobile platform.