Wi-Fi capability for consumer electronics and more

An Asix Electronics product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 6, 2010

Asix Electronics is now delivering the AX220xx, a single-chip microcontroller with TCP/IP and 802.11 WLAN MAC/baseband, designed to leverage Wi-Fi infrastructure in home and office environments.

As the latest addition to Asix's Embedded Network SoC product portfolio, the AX220xx provides cost-competitive a wireless connectivity system for bridging uncompressed digital audio data, compressed digital video data and serial/parallel user data over the Wi-Fi network.

It enables internet connection capability for many applications, including consumer electronics, networked home appliances, Wi-Fi speaker, industrial equipments, security systems, remote data collection equipments, remote control, remote monitoring, and remote management.

The System-on-Chip (SoC) device offers dual-CPU architecture with on-chip 1MB shared Flash as program memory, on-chip 64KB data memory for main CPU (MCPU), on-chip 32KB data memory for Wi-Fi CPU (WCPU), TCP/IP accelerator, 802.11a/b/g compatible WLAN MAC/Baseband, fast ethernet MAC and rich communication peripherals for a wide variety of applications requiring access to the wired/wireless LAN or internet.

Its dual-CPU architecture utilises the MCPU for applications and TCP/IP processing, and the WCPU for WLAN protocol processing and ethernet to WLAN packet format translation.

The built-in WLAN MAC and baseband processor are compatible with IEEE 802.11a/b/g standard and support security features compatible with 802.11i and QoS features compatible with IEEE 802.11e.

In addition to standalone application, AX220xx with TCP/IP protocol suite running on-chip and various parallel and serial host interfaces supported, such as local bus interface, high-speed UART or high-speed SPI, can be used as a network co-processor to offload TCP/IP and WLAN protocol processing loading from system CPU in an embedded system.

Asix provides comprehensive technical support information for using the AX220xx in a Development/Reference Design Kit.

The kit includes the hardware and software application notes, user guides, schematics, PCB layout guide and the firmware C source code for the AX220xx range free of charge.

Several versions of platform are available for customers' development purposes.