Conexant Systems Inc., Newport Beach, Calif., recently released the world's lowest power and smallest form factor 802.11g wireless local area network (WLAN) radio for embedded mobile applications. The single-chip CX3110X is a power-efficient, compact chip targeted at high-performance, battery-operated mobile devices such as multimedia cellular phones, enterprise handsets, PDAs, and digital cameras. According to Conexant, the CX3110X is shipping in volume quantities and has been designed into several handset models by leading cellular telephone manufacturers. A hardware and software reference design also is available to enable manufacturers and system integrators to rapidly integrate wireless connectivity into mobile platforms.

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The standards-compliant CX3110X is a fully integrated wireless radio that includes a zero intermediate frequency (ZIF) transceiver, radio frequency (RF) synthesizer/voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), high-speed data converters, ARM9(R)-based media access controller (MAC), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing/complementary code key (OFDM/CCK) digital baseband processor, and a complete power management unit (PMU). Host control is provided by a flexible serial peripheral interface (SPI) supporting bit rates of 48 Mbps.

The CX3110X is packaged in a 12.5-mm × 7-mm low-profile ball grid array (LPBGA) and is priced at $15 each in quantities of 10,000.