Ultra-wideband (UWB) solutions provider Wisair has released its second-generation monolithic Wimedia-MBOA RF transceiver 502 to pre-production. To enable OEMs to rapidly develop their own UWB-based applications, the new 502 chip has been integrated into Wisair's reference designs and is being made available to users.

"IBM is pleased that Wisair has selected our 0.18-um SiGe BiCMOS technology for their pre-production UWB RF transceiver chip. This is the second successful RF chip that Wisair has developed using IBM SiGe technology and its price, performance and model maturity enables Wisair to ship competitive UWB solutions to its customers," said Teddy O'Connell, manager for business development, IBM Systems & Technology Group, Semiconductor Offerings.

"In preparation toward our pre-production phase we have developed a second-generation proven performance silicon RF chip that is poised to help our customers significantly reduce their power consumption and overall cost of UWB solutions. Our small die-size 502 RF chip is a fully integrated MB-OFDM RF transceiver with less than 10 external passive components." said David Yaish, Wisair president and CEO.

The 502 chip replaces the 501 version, which was the company's first WiMedia-MB-OFDM compliant transceiver providing bit rate up to 480 Mbps. The second-generation 502 chip offers further reduction in power consumption, and its die size was significantly reduced, according to Wisair. The 502 chip provides antenna diversity by supporting two antennas simultaneously. It supports MB-OFDM TFI and FFI modes and occupies a frequency spectrum range between 3.1 GHz to 4.8 GHz with three sub-bands of 528 MHz each. The 502 chip incorporates internal filtering providing coexistence with Bluetooth as well as 802.11a/b/g.

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