Designed to advance the deployment of Wi-Fi in portable devices, such as wireless handsets, the Atheros AR6002 (the second-generation single-chip family of ROCm devices) provides the lowest active-mode power consumption of any mobile WLAN solution. To further extend battery life, the device also includes a near-zero standby power mode. The IC is therefore well positioned to accelerate the development of emerging Wi-Fi applications, such as mobile phones that support peer-to-peer connectivity, mesh networking or dual-mode (cellular/VoWLAN) operation.

According to Atheros, the device consumes as much as 70% less power in active mode than existing solutions. For example, it is has been calculated that more than 100 hours would be required for the device to deplete a standard 3.7 V, 800 mAh phone battery in continual VoWLAN mode. In other applications, the device can establish a TCP downlink at 22 Mbps while consuming less than 140 mW. This allows the device to download as much as 200 gigabytes of data before depleting the same battery.

Advanced power-management features further reduce the total power consumption of the device. For example, the wake-on-wireless feature can be used to keep a host processor in idle mode until an active wireless link is established. Furthermore, the device draws very little power to maintain a Wi-Fi connection once it has been established, consuming about 1.4 mW when the delivery traffic indication message, or DTIM, is set to wake up every three beacons. The device can even simulate unscheduled automatic power save delivery (U-APSD) operation to maintain low power consumption when connecting to APs that don’t support U-APSD as standardized in the 802.11e specification.

The near-zero (60 μW) standby power feature of the IC is equally critical for mobile devices, for which operation in standby mode dominates typical usage patterns, according to Atheros. In addition to the 22 Mbps downlink, the device can also establish a TCP uplink at 21 Mbps, minimizing the total time the device must operate out of this standby power mode.

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