Red Pine and Atmel team up on WiFi

 We talked with Atmel and Red Pine Signals about their joint move into embedded WiFi. The two companies are working together to provide an embedded wireless data solution to their mutual customers.

Red Pine makes an RF module for 802.11a/b/g/n service. The complete module is available in two configurations, a 1X1 and a 3X3. The module is visible to the system as a black box in the I/O space, and includes all the circuitry to operate the full WiFi protocols. By including all of the components, they can deliver a module with FCC and WiFi certification as a plug-in component. They claim low power operation for their IP in the 1X1 configuration, with the assumption that the transceiver is in standby mode most of the time. The 3X3 does not allow for any power savings modes, since this is a full dual channel –n subsystem.

Using prepackaged parts reduces a developer’s time to market. This joint release adds WiFi capabilities to the existing Zigbee parts already available from Atmel. The various microprocessor families are directed towards embedded applications with a need for nominal amounts of I/O and different quantities of volatile and non-volatile storage on chip. Test designs only needed a thin driver using less than 20 kB of storage to implement the WiFi capabilities in a AVR processor.

Together, the Atmel and the Red Pine parts provide flexibility and accessibility to embedded systems that need wireless data transfers, especially for those functions that need multi-band operations. Separate SDKs are available for the WiFi module and for the various Atmel processors. Development boards and modules are available. For more information see their respective websites: www.atmel.com and www.redpinesignals.com