Wireless solutions boast low power, small form

Marvell debuts the Avastar family of wireless connectivity solutions targeting the entire spectrum of always-on consumer electronics devices including handsets, portable media players, eReaders, printers, digital cameras, smartbooks/netbooks, DTVs, STBs, DVD players, gaming consoles, thermostats, and other home appliances.

The Avastar family includes single-function and multifunction radios (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM/GPS) that establish new industry benchmarks for power consumption, wireless performance, solution footprint, and advanced features. This allows OEMs to create more reliable, affordable and slimmer products with longer battery life to provide the best possible consumer experience.

"Marvell has been a pioneer in the development of Wi-Fi technology for CE starting with our first generation of Wi-Fi enabled CE products in 2003. With the new Avastar family, we are ready to assume the mantle of leadership for multi-function wireless devices," said Partho Mishra, VP and general manager of embedded and emerging business unit, Marvell. "Over the last two years, our technology teams developed wireless IP cores which we believe are at least a generation ahead of any competitive product. Today, we can quickly snap these cores together to create highly optimized wireless devices for a particular market. Our team hears positive feedback from our customers about the 88W8787 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM device. For example, the wireless solutions have enabled several tier one CE platforms to demonstrate vastly better performance in head-to-head customer lab bake-offs against competitive products while remaining extremely cost effective."

Avastar family highlights include lower power consumption, with each of the Marvell wireless radios designed to consume efficiently in all system modes—sleep, active standby and active Rx/Tx. In some cases, Avastar solutions use less than one fourth the power of comparable solutions, dramatically extending battery life for mobile products.

They offer the small footprint, at up to half the size of comparable products on the market. They also claim superior Wi-Fi 802.11n performance, supporting both 2.4GHz and 5GHz modes of operations and employ advanced features to maximize the range and integrity of the wireless network, including one, two, and three spatial stream configurations with PHY data rates from 150Mbit/s to 450Mbit/s. They offer the best available receive sensitivity for increased network range, as well as support for Tx beam-forming and other advanced features which dramatically improve link robustness.