Jedec to standardize WLAN chip interfaces

By
CommsDesign.com
(03/28/02, 05:27:24 PM EDT)

ARLINGTON, Va. The Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council (Jedec) hopes to standardize a digital interface that will link chips in wireless LAN system architectures, and announced the formation of a subcommittee this week that will develop such an interface.

As WLAN technology finds its way into more consumer products, system manufacturers are calling for second sources of WLAN chips, said Stuart Kerry, chairman of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN Work Group. To that end, Acer, Philips and other manufacturers have pushed for a standard digital interface that could link such chips as media-access controllers and physical-layer devices in a WLAN system, Kerry said.

Though it was uncertain at first if the spec would be handled by an IEEE 802.11 or Jedec committee, Kerry said it made sense to push the standard to Jedec, as the IEEE 802.11 committee doesn't focus on chip-to-chip interconnects. Instead, 802.11 focuses on defining radio specifications for media-access control (MAC) and physical-layer (PHY) devices. "802.11 is working at a different layer on the OSI stack," Kerry said.

The Jedec subcommittee defining the interface spec will operate under the JC-61 tag. The group plans to look at the interface between MAC and PHY components and between a WLAN system's baseband processor and radio transceiver.

With input from Semiconductor Business News.