San Jose, CA — (press release excerpt) — Atmel Corporation released today three new parts to its family of Wireless LAN products. This family, called Fast-VirtualNet, are single chip baseband Media Access Controllers (MAC) supporting three popular system interfaces: PCMCIA or Compact Flash, USB and PCI or mini-PCI. The fast-VirtualNet family provides a wireless interface following the IEEE 802.11b standard and supports standard data rates up to 11 Mbps. These single-chip MAC+Baseband controllers include complete processing and functionality in order to facilitate the Wi-Fi certification procedure for Atmel customer companies.

The AT76C504/505/506 chips incorporate an ARM7TDMI processor using a sophisticated architecture to control the on-chip peripherals, manage the internal memory and allocate data queue buffers as well as communicate through the PCMCIA, USB or PCI buses. The architecture, now including an integrated baseband controller is similar to previously designed MAC parts. In addition to these features that are supported by Atmel's stand-alone MAC's, they also are available for the newer security standards or protocols such as 802.1x, and TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol). The Fast-VirtualNet family is provided together with various software drivers including Linux and other operating systems. For all OS's where WHQL certification exists, the drivers provided from Atmel to Customer Companies are in a WHQL certifiable state.

These devices have a seamless interface to the RF Micro Devices (RFMD) front-end chipset. Together with earlier reference designs, they retain all the key features and benefits of the previous family of products adding a lower pin count, an even more competitive Bill of Material (BOM) and more reliability and robustness due to the simplicity of the system and software. The products are being well received into the market with design wins with major OEM's ODM's and Tier 1 companies. These designs will be shipping by the end of the year in applications such as printers, PDA's, calculators and many more.

 
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