With new product, AMD takes on heavyweights in wireless chip market
Analyst Greg Quick
the451
Sector Storage & Systems
Report date Mon, 4 Nov 2002
Advanced Micro Devices has started sampling its wireless chipset, the Am1772 Wireless LAN product, which the company is pairing with a mini-PCI card reference design. Final products are due in the first quarter of 2003. The new offering, based on the technology AMD gained when it acquired Alchemy last summer, means AMD will beat Intel to market with a 802.11b product that its customers can use in designs for notebooks and other portable products.
Impact assessment
The message
AMD has leveraged its investment in Alchemy with a new technology that has the potential to bring additional revenue streams to the company – something that is very important right now.
Competitive landscape
Intel has said it is working on a dual-band 802.11a/b product, and there are a number of other players – including Texas Instruments, Intersil and Atheros Communications – that are developing 802.11 chipsets as well.
The451 assessment
This move is good for AMD on many levels: it stands to make its portable products more competitive, it opens new markets for the company, and it shows that its investment in Alchemy was a sound one.
Context - The 802.11 wireless chipset market is a highly competitive field with a large number of players and growing interest from consumers to corporations. Intel recently pledged $150m in investment from its Communications Fund to help jump-start companies developing the infrastructure for this market.
AMD had been seeking to get back into the portable embedded and wireless processor business when it purchased Alchemy Semiconductor for an undisclosed sum in February 2002. It had departed this market a few years back when it sold off its AM29000 RISC-based offerings to focus on its core business – microprocessors – which was not prospering at the time.
At the time of its purchase, Alchemy's main products were the Au1000 and the Au1500, both based on the MIPS32 architecture. The Au1000 has been around for over a year and has about 15 design wins. The Au1500 was introduced late last year as a more powerful and flexible processor capable of running at a number of different speeds, with each using a different amount of voltage.
Last month, AMD said it would start marketing a range of products under the Alchemy Solutions brand name, including microprocessor cores, wireless chipsets, reference designs and development boards.
Technology - The Am1772 is a two-chip CMOS-based product that features both a baseband processor and a media access controller along with a direct memory access (DMA) host interface. The product includes the Am1772 chipset, which comprises the Am1770 radio frequency transceiver and the Am1771 baseband processor and MAC. The Am1770 transceiver utilizes direct-down conversion, which eliminates the requirement for an intermediate frequency chip.
Strategy - AMD has big plans in this area. The company says this is just its first step into the wireless market and that it has several more products on the board for the next 12 months. AMD is also working to integrate the wireless chip technology with its MIPS-based cores for complete system-on-a-chip products.
Competition - Intel has said it plans to build a chipset that supports both 802.11a and 802.11b, so that legacy networks will still be supported. The first chipset is expected to ship in conjunction with a new generation of mobile microprocessors code-named Banias, due sometime in 2003.
Intersil and Atheros are the leaders in this market segment, which while still relatively small, is expected to undergo tremendous growth in the next few years. There has been a great deal of activity in this segment in the past year. Among the more recent moves in the area are RF Micro Devices purchasing Resonext Communications for $133m and Agere Systems and Infineon agreeing to work together to develop chipsets. |
