Redpine Signals Launches Industry's First Simultaneous Dual-band and High Performance 450 Mbps 3x3 802.11n Chipset for Digital Home and Enterprise Applications

Redpine Signals, Inc have announced the launch of its Maxi-Fi® BEAM450TM suite of highly integrated semiconductor products conforming to the 802.11n standard. The Maxi-Fi® BEAM450 family is the industry's first MIMO chipset to support software configurable simultaneous dual-band. This patent pending feature enables the system integrators to re-configure the MIMO chipset on-the-fly from a 3-Spatial Stream 450Mbps 3x3 system (working in either 2.4GHz or 5GHz ISM bands) into a simultaneous dual-band system with 150Mbps in one band and 300Mbps in the other band.

Simultaneous dual-band enables robust QoS provisioning for demanding video applications in crowded wireless environments, and significantly, the Maxi-Fi® BEAM450 provides this at zero cost and power overhead to the system. The new Maxi-Fi products include the RS9330 802.11n Baseband chip interfacing to either the RS8330 (Dual-band MIMO Radio chip) or the RS8331 (Dual-band MIMO Radio chip with built-in high power-amplifiers). The Maxi-Fi® BEAM450™ chipsets complement Redpine Signals' highly successful ultra-low power 802.11n Lite-Fi® device family.

Redpine also provides TURBO900™ and TURBO1350™ reference designs, which use two or three RS9330 chips respectively. These designs provide physical layer throughputs of 900Mbps and 1.35Gbps on a single PCI-e host interface, thus addressing the performance requirements of today's most demanding wireless video applications.

With CMOS integration of a high performance MAC, baseband processor, analog front-end, crystal oscillator, calibration EEPROM, balun, dual-band RF transceiver and dual-band high-power amplifiers (RS8331 only), the Maxi-Fi® BEAM450 products are cost-effective solutions targeting high throughput and high QoS wireless applications such as HD video streaming, storage devices, wireless routers, broadband access modems, televisions, access points, and set-top boxes. The Maxi-Fi® BEAM450 chipset maintains over 300Mbps of TCP data throughput on various host platforms and runs on the 802.11n MAC on a powerful SoC based on Redpine's proprietary four-threaded processor (ThreadArch®) with very low-host overhead.

The Maxi-Fi® BEAM450 chipset is accompanied by Redpine'sOneBox™ software framework with DirectLINQ™. OneBox™ supports Access Point, Station and Wi-Fi Direct™ functionality on a variety of host platforms and operating systems including Linux and Windows families. Redpine also offers form-factor PCI-e and USB2.0 reference designs and software for manufacture testing and diagnostics, minimizing effort and time-to-market in the building of complete systems.

Availability
The Maxi-Fi® BEAM450™ chipsets will be sampling in Q3-2011, with volume shipment scheduled for Q1-2012.

Venkat Mattela, CEO of Redpine Signals, Inc.
Wide spread usage of media streaming on wireless is a reality today. With the timely introduction of the Maxi-Fi® BEAM450™ chipset to our product offerings we are not only providing a cost effective solution but also accelerating the penetration of Wi-Fi into these markets by offering higher throughput and range. Our Maxi-Fi® BEAM450™ products incorporate Redpine's fifth-generation 802.11 technology, leveraging our vast WLAN patent-portfolio developed over the past ten years, and stand out in wireless performance in adverse environments.


Flint Pulskamp, Research Director, Semiconductor Wireless and Consumer Programs, IDC
Consumers increasingly want to plug entertainment devices into their home Wi-Fi networks. This along with rapid adoption of Wi-Fi technology into the Internet of Things market creates stringent QoS requirements, which are difficult to meet using single-band or even switchable dual-band 802.11n solutions. Simultaneous dual-band provides the right answer to this problem and is the best approach to maintain high QoS for applications like wireless video distribution while supporting regular web-browsing, email and FTP on the legacy 2.4GHz home Wi-Fi network.