Original 45nm Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture

The Technical Challenges of Transitioning Intel® PRO/Wireless Solutions to a Half-Mini Card

INTEL® PRO/Wireless 5000

Wi-Fi solutions

The Intel PRO/Wireless series 5000 of network adaptors targets both premium and value-market segments. The premium device called 5300 is a full IEEE 802.11n MIMO three-transmit and three-receive (also known as 3×3) chains, dual band (2.4GHz and 5–6GHz) Wi-Fi solution. This enables the user to achieve up to 450Mbps over the air data throughput, using standard communication protocols in both the Up Link (UL) and Down Link (DL) directions. This MIMO 3×3 scheme generally improves the data throughput vs. distance performance in a multi-path environment typical of indoor wireless connectivity, as expected in a premium device.

The value network adaptor device called 5100 is a scaled-down version of the 5300 premium network adaptor. It offers a MIMO 1×2 scheme (one transmit and two receive chains) and also supports dual band. This MIMO configuration offers a data throughput of up to 300Mbps in the DL direction and up to 150Mbps in the UP direction. This coincides with typical usage models in which we usually want to receive more than we actually want to send.

For the purposes of this paper, we concentrate on the Intel PRO/Wireless 5300 device, mainly because this was the more challenging of the two. However, our discussion is also applicable to the 5100 device in a more limited capacity.

In (Figure 4) we show a general block diagram of the Intel PRO/Wireless 5300 Wi-Fi 3×3 solution. The main building blocks incorporated in the solution are these:

• The Media Access Controller and Base Band chip (also known as MAC BB)
• The Radio Transceiver chip (also known as Radio)
• The Front End Module (FEM)
• The Power Management Unit (PMU)
• The EEPROM
• Xtal

Figure 4: Intel PROWireless 5300 block diagram

The MAC BB chip serves as the Host Interface that is the main connection to the rest of the CMT platform. It is also directly connected to the Radio Transceiver. The Radio Transceiver contains three Radio Frequency (RF) chains, each containing transmit and receive circuitry that supports both unlicensed Wi-Fi communications bands of 2.4 GHz and 5–6GHz. The Radio Transceiver in turn is connected to three front-end circuits that are used to amplify and filter the RF signals connected to the antenna ports. The PMU supplies all the necessary bias voltages used in the system that are not directly received from the platform power source. The EEPROM device is used to store some of the key board-specific information such as MAC Address, Regulatory Parameters, and Calibration Tables that are programmed into the device during production. The Xtal is connected to an internal Crystal Oscillator (XO) circuit that generates the required clock and signal reference in the system.

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