Greg, At this moment, I think Ruckus is it. As yet, there's been no silicon support for beamforming under 11n. The one silicon vendor that's been vocal about beamforming is a startup, Quantenna Communications. They claim to have a chip that provides both 4x4 MIMO and beamforming, and claim it's in production. They recently announced that Netgear has signed up to use their chips (http://www.quantenna.com/pressrelease-01_05_10.html), but so far no news of what Netgear products might show up, or when.
Lacking silicon support for beamforming, Ruckus does beamforming by "antenna selection." They have an array of 12 antenna elements, a set of switches and presumably some switchable delays. They claim this gives them a choice of 4095 distinct antenna patterns. Antenna selections in this case means they pick which two of the 4095 distinct beams to use, on a packet by packet basis. They then connect those two configurations to the two inputs of a standard Atheros 11n 2x2 MIMO chip. I can't guess what we'll see for silicon based beamforming in the next 24 months (beyond the Quantenna chips), but I am optimistic that all silicon vendors will be driven to do full beamforming in silicon, eventually. The reason is residential Wi-Fi in apartment buildings (think of all those 30 story apartment buildings in Hong Kong and Beijing). When every apartment has an access point, you need directional to avoid interference from your neighbors. I'm sure the VCs that invested in Quantenna expect to sell out to whichever mainstream Wi-Fi chip vendor doesn't get their beamforming working in time. I'm just not sure of time frames. Thanks, Brough Skype: brough Mobile: +1 617 285 0433 http://blogs.broughturner.com On 2/7/10 6:41 AM, Greg wrote: > Though the 802.11n specification details beam forming it appears the only > manufacturer to explicitly market their product as doing beam forming is > Ruckus. Does anyone know if other manufacturer's products with multiple > antennas do any kind of beam forming, or do the offerings of other > manufacturers with multiple antennas merely use one antenna or the other at > any given instant. I understand that Ruckus' product is highly specialized > in the antenna/beam forming aspect and has a very involved antenna array and > control system, but still the other manufacturer's products with only two > simple rubber duckies could still do some pattern shaping if the phasing of > the two antennas is varied, not as effectively as the Ruckus products of > course, but it would offer some improvement as far as gain and especially > multipath/interference rejection. > > Greg > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > > -- Thanks, Brough Skype: brough Mobile: +1 617 285 0433 http://blogs.broughtunrer.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
