low-power cost effective SoC solution for WLAN applications

The Panasonic PAN9320 series low-power consumption, cost effective system-on-chip (SoC) solution for WLAN applications is now available from Farnell element14. Features include superior 802.11 wireless radio, baseband processor, medium access controller, CPU, encryption unit, boot ROM with patching capability, internal SRAM, in-system programmable flash memory and many more. The devices also feature integrated firmware consisting of TCP/IP-stack on 802.11 MAC with various application features. Driver-firmware interface handles all 802.11 MAC management tasks by converting standard 802.3 Ethernet frames to the SoC firmware for transmission over the wireless link as 802.11 frames, processing the received 802.11 frames and converting them into 802.3 Ethernet frames before forwarding them to the host driver. The Host driver is separated into three module; the Standard Ethernet driver, the 802.11 Extensions and the Hardware Interface Driver. The Hardware Interface Driver controls the hardware interface on the HOST side, while the 802.11 Extensions module extends the Standard Ethernet driver in order to view and control the state of the WLAN adapter.