Marvell Brings 802.11n to Handhelds

Marvell's single-antenna "1x1" 802.11n solution brings 802.11n Wi-Fi down to a size that could easily fit into smartphones.
High-speed Wi-Fi 802.11n is coming to smartphones soon, chipmaker Marvell Semiconductor said at Mobile World Congress on Thursday. The company, which is behind the processors in high-end BlackBerrys and many Windows Mobile phones, also showed a range of new application processors that use simple instruction sets at fast speeds.
Marvell's single-antenna "1x1" 802.11n solution finally brings 802.11n Wi-Fi down to a size that could be incorporated into smartphones, Sameer Bidichandani, senior director of technology strategy at Marvell Semiconductor said in an interview.

Until now, mobile phones have been stuck at slower 802.11g speeds because 802.11n required chips and antennas that are too large to fit into a mobile-phone form factor. The 1x1 single-stream 802.11n solution can take 802.11n down to a chip as small as 50 mm square, which could easily fit into a phone. That could boost cell-phone Wi-Fi speeds by several times. The 1x1 802.11n chips are available to manufacturers today, he said.

Marvell also showed off the company's brand-new PXA910/912/920 chipsets, which bring the performance of the PXA930 processor found in the BlackBerry Bold to much lower price points. These processors could enable sub-$100 handhelds with PXA930 power, Marvell's David Elfersi said. The PXA910/912/920 series have an 800-MHz core which uses the ARM9 instruction set rather than the ARM11 instruction set. This makes the chips more compatible with software written for older and midrange phones, so they're easy to develop for.

Along with the new low-cost chipsets, Marvell showed its most powerful chips, the PXA935 and PXA168 "Aspen." Both chips are faster than the existing PXA930, with clock speeds up to 1 GHz in the Aspen's case. But unlike gigahertz chips from competitors Qualcomm and TI, these chips also run that ARM9 instruction set, which could let manufacturers go to market quickly using software that was mostly written for older processors.

To show the wide compatibility of the company's processors, Marvell demonstrated a whole bunch of operating systems. The company had third-party Android devices running, as well as Windows Mobile 6.1, Windows Mobile 6.5 and the LiMo Linux platform. On Marvell's demonstration Android phones, Marvell was showing some custom software, including a multitouch-enabled photo gallery app with pinch-to-zoom, just like on the iPhone.

Rather than showing mind-boggling HD video like in the Nvidia booth, Marvell focused on affordable solutions that kicked power up a notch without requiring developers to rewrite their code. That might get Marvell's solutions into users' hands fast.