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networkZONE Products for the week of November 3, 2008
Quantenna Communications Says…
Wireless Chipsets that Deliver Guaranteed Bandwidth for High Speed Wireless Networking
Advanced Configurable 4x4 MIMO Chipsets with Transmit Beam forming Enable Ultra Reliable Wireless Bandwidth and Unprecedented Performance up to 1 Gbit/s
Quantenna Communications, Inc., a developer of silicon for intelligent wireless networking, announced the world’s first fully integrated 802.11n chipsets with 4x4 MIMO and transmit beamforming that are designed to deliver guaranteed bandwidth for any home, anywhere. The Quantenna High Speed (QHS) family of chipsets pioneers a new level of ultra reliability for delivering high-definition (HD) multimedia content over the air. With its advanced architecture that includes vector mesh routing, two or four concurrent bands and throughput link rates in excess of 1 Gbits/s, Quantenna has taken the technology lead in establishing a new approach to intelligent wireless networking.
Quantenna designed its chipsets to meet the demands of the rapidly growing Wireless LAN (WLAN) market, including network equipment and consumer electronics manufacturers for wireless LAN semiconductors that could reach $7 billion with 1.2 billion units by 2012, according to market research from ABI Research.
“With this announcement, Quantenna has taken a major leap forward in wireless LAN chipset architecture, throughput, and reliability,” said Craig Mathias, a principal at the mobile and wireless advisory firm Farpoint Group. “I’m very impressed with the flexibility and configurability of their offering, which make it appropriate to a broad range of applications. In a highly-competitive market where performance and innovation predominate, Quantenna has staked out an impressive position.”
Wi-Fi has become the prominent technology of choice for home networking and consumer devices, requiring wireless networks to support more bandwidth-intensive applications, such as wireless HD, HDTV and Internet protocol television (IPTV) services. However, wireless home and enterprise networks frequently suffer from dead zones, unreliable bandwidth, poor coverage and signal interference. While many 802.11 chipsets are suitable for data transmission, they are not robust enough to support reliable multimedia services. As a result, equipment vendors have tried to combine disparate technologies, but have not been able to achieve guaranteed bandwidth.
The new Quantenna chipsets – QHS450, QHS600 and QHS1000 – overcome interference and dead zones, enabling consumers and carriers to reliably deploy wireless HD, HDTV and IPTV services, to any point in the home over a plug-and-play wireless network. The QHS chipsets are the first in the industry to bring together the following technologies in a standards-compliant 802.11 a/b/g/n:
- 4x4 MIMO radio/antenna - Offers the highest possible reliability in high-interference conditions;
- Transmit Beamforming – Enables the chip to locate receiving devices and focus the signal on them, improving range and data rate while conserving power;
- Concurrent dual band – Supports real-time video transmission via the 5 Ghz band and data over the 2.4 Ghz band;
- Vector Mesh networking – Guarantees total coverage in any size home by using adaptive vector mesh routing; and
- Highest Integration - Integrates high efficiency power amplifiers (PAs) with 18 dBm output power along with LNA, VGA, switches, baluns and diplexers that constitute a front-end module.
“Highly reliable wireless bandwidth is exactly what carriers are looking for,” said Corrado Rocca, senior vice president of Product Marketing and Development at Pirelli Broadband Solutions S.p.A. “It eliminates the need for home rewiring and allows for seamless HDTV and ‘multiple play’ wireless connectivity, while enabling complete home coverage. A combination of advanced MIMO features, such as 4x4 radio, transmit beam forming, vector mesh networking and concurrent dual bands are all critical elements required to achieve an ultra reliable, high speed wireless bandwidth.”
“Our QHS family of chipsets is essential for solving wireless reliability problems and delivering guaranteed bandwidth all in one solution, unlike competing chips which can only offer best-effort wireless performance,” says Dr. Behrooz Rezvani, Quantenna’s founder and CEO. “Equipment vendors and carriers who adopt Quantenna chipsets as their standard will have an immediate competitive advantage and accelerate equipment revenue and service revenue.”
The QHS family consists of:
- QHS 1000 – up to 1 Gbits/s link speed and 600 Mbits/s data throughput.
- QHS 600 – up to 600 Mbits/s link speed and 400 Mbits/s data throughput.
- QHS 450 – up to 450 Mbits/s link speed and 200 Mbits/s data throughput.
Quantenna’s solutions also include the QHS Plug, which is a reference system that OEMs can use to produce wireless networking solutions that can be plugged into any power outlet, and the Quantenna Operating Software, a full-featured access point routing software that significantly accelerates development time and works in conjunction with QHS chips.
EN-Genius Says…
When Quantenna briefed me on their Wi-Fi chip sets a few weeks ago my first reaction was to wonder if these folks are either a bunch of naïve engineers who don’t understand the realities of the very mature market they’re trying to play in, or if they are very smart and have a hot product on their hands. Happily, it looks like the latter. They have combined a healthy dose of marketing savvy with some clever engineering to create a set of products that, instead of going head on with the Big Three Wi-Fi players, fills a real need that Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell have yet to fully address. Their single-package radios use a combination of mesh protocols and MIMO technology to deliver the guaranteed bandwidth required to support high-bandwidth multimedia in many challenging environments where conventional Wi-Fi products will find it difficult or impossible.
Until recently, I’ve been very skeptical about the feasibility of using Wi-Fi to ship HD (or even SD) video much further than across a living room because of the many bad things that can happen to good signals in a typical home. As any Wi-Fi savvy engineer knows, these obstacles vary by region but regardless of where you put your wireless data system you’ll get some combination of attenuation from walls and ceilings, interference from adjacent Wi-Fi systems and other electrical equipment, as well as simple losses that occur across the longer distances found in larger homes. Recent conversations with Atheros indicate that they’ve made meaningful strides in overcoming some of these problems with some really great transceiver designs, but I worry there will still be lots of corner cases where thick walls, longer distances and other major impairments will still make a traditional Wi-Fi set-up impractical for wireless video.
Quantenna gets around this by deploying an inexpensive, low-overhead mesh network that can be sprinkled throughout a house as needed to give full bandwidth coverage to even the hardest-to-reach locations. All Quantenna devices support the latest draft of the nearly-complete 802.11s mesh network protocol to make the best use of the bandwidth afforded by their 4X4 MIMO system that uses transmit beam forming to achieve better link reliability in challenging conditions. Since most of the high-level parts of the 802.11s protocol stack are run on the integrated ARM-9 RISC processor, a simple software update can accommodate any changes that occur between now and the time that the standard is finalized.
To get the link reliability they need, Quantenna overlays the basic 802.11s mesh protocol with their own lightweight messaging scheme. This allows individual nodes to cooperate on managing radio resources and building data routing tables that assign specific paths and capacities to individual data, voice or video streams. Quantenna says that the mesh protocol reference design they supply is good enough for home multimedia networks but that there is enough extra processing power in the embedded ARM-9 core that developers can modify it to support the demands of more sophisticated applications. You can develop your own code (mostly in C), or Quantenna will happily work with you to develop your custom application.
 All of Quantenna’s products are single-package, multi-device designs that make use of some very clever design and manufacturing (much of which I’m not allowed to talk about) to improve overall performance while cutting external components to a minimum. Some of the secret sauce that Quantenna was willing to share was the fact that they have developed a hardware engine to generate the MIMO baseband signals and a custom DSP that handles the beam forming function. Beam forming is accomplished by manipulating the phase and amplitude of the baseband signals of each antenna. Quantenna says that the combination of 4X4 MIMO and beam steering can deliver up to 10 dB more link margin than conventional 3X3 MIMO solutions.
As the release above notes, their 5 GHz QHS600 can support a single 4 x 4 channel or two 2 x 2 channels at full rate (1 Gbit/s raw data rate, 600 Mbit/s effective). The QHS450 does the same at 2.4 GHz and both modules can be connected via their inter-chip links to create a dual-band solution that supports quad 2 x 2 or dual 4 x 4 concurrent operation. Quantenna says that to get anything near the equivalent functionality with true concurrent dual-band operation using competing dual-band solutions you’d have to use multiple chip sets. Mesh traffic can be time-shared on a single 4 x 4 channel or run as a separate 2 x 2 channel. I’d expect to see 4 x 4 operation mostly in homes to support video distribution and that the 2 x 2 mode will find more use in SMB/enterprise products that deliver reliable bandwidth across large office spaces.
By packaging all network-side, baseband and RF components in a single enclosure, Quantenna makes it very easy to create compact, low-cost networking boxes that will really deliver on what 802.11n has been promising for years. Their reference design has been implemented on an evaluation board that is somewhere between a third and a quarter of the size of anything I’ve seen with comparable functionality. Their reference design includes a set of very effective dual-band antennas that were designed and made by Quantenna using a low-temperature co-fire ceramic (LTCC) process that gives you lots of performance in a very compact package. If a customer really wants to, they can substitute their own antenna selection but they’d be hard-pressed to get the same precise impedance matching, gain characteristics and overall quality at a lower price.
About the only Wi-Fi products I’ve seen that offer as much intelligence and functionality are the controller chips in BandSpeed access points http://www.bandspeed.com/ which use their proprietary silicon and software to deliver enterprise-class bandwidth management and security. But enterprise-class features usually carry enterprise-class price tags of several thousand dollars. In contrast, Quantenna’s compact form factor, low component count and pricing as low as $20, should make it easy for manufacturers to offer a basic video-friendly router/switch for around $100, and a meshed repeater node for less than that.
Whenever a newcomer like Quantenna makes such audacious claims for their first-ever products it makes me a tad worried about whether they’ll be able to deliver on-time and with all promises fulfilled. Nevertheless, the straightforward answers I got to my technical questions and the solid engineering that obviously went into these devices helped keep Quantenna’s Saltshaker Rating to a respectable level.
Quantenna will begin sampling its QHS family of chipsets with top-tier customers in both the retail and carrier markets in Q4 2008.
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