WLAN System , HW , and RFIC Architecture for the Intel ® PRO / Wireless 3945 ABG Network Connection

The corporate challenge of being “one generation ahead” has prompted us to find new ways to improve our time to market, size, and cost of our WLAN products. By identifying the key issues which challenged us in our previous-generation products and by shifting our design effort to a platform-level optimization, we moved to a topdown approach in our Si and hardware architecture design flow. By taking the product-level requirements down to the last component on the board using this new methodology, we enabled smoother and cleaner platform integrations, as well as smaller and cheaper solutions. This paper summarizes the different architectural and functional changes in our products, from the system level down to the board/Si level. In addition, we discuss some of the design issues to ensure robust and reliable RF designs in our radio chips. The Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection, which is a part of Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology, is the first Intel WLAN product to be conceived in this way.