Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) experience a growing popularity
recently. Where WLANs were primarily used for niche applications in the
past, they are now deployed as wireless extensions to computer networks.
The increase of the datarates from 2 Mbps up to 11 Mbps for roughly a
constant price has played a major role in this breakthrough. As a
consequence, an even greater success can be envisioned for the more
recent OFDM-based WLAN standards in the 5 GHz band, which offer up to 54
Mbps. At IMEC we have realised this potential already several years ago
and have established a successful research programme on OF- based WLAN.
In 1995, we started our research on wireless OFDM in the frame of a -
operation project with SAIT, a Belgian telecom company. The goal of the
project was to establish a robust network for industrial environments.
This resulted in a first OFDM chip, supporting QPSK, for wireless
networking at the end of the project (1999). 1999 was also the start of
an intense co-operation with National Semiconductor Inc., which resulted
in a second generation ASIC in 2000. This OFDM processor supports up to
QAM-64 and has a more optimal channel estimation algorithm.