Atmel® Corporation the renowned organization in designing and manufacturing of microcontrollers and advanced logic announced here today the second of its MAX-Link™ series of transceivers designed specifically for WiMAX applications. It has also been reported, that along with the enhanced WiMAX system functionality, the AT86RF535B enables one of the lowest component costs of any RF reference design on the market today. This frequency-agile, single-chip transceiver is operated at 3.5 GHz with multiple bandwidth options addressing the requirements of WiMAX base stations and subscriber equipment.

In addition, the internal configuration and control registers can be programmed so as to integrate with new and existing baseband devices from different vendors. All of the MAX-Link transceivers provide excellent RF performance with low current consumption, low cost, and only a minimum of external components for the RF design.

Atmel, founded in 1984, is a renowned leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. The company through influencing one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, has been able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions. It is recorded as one of the minority elite new companies who are capable of incorporating dense nonvolatile memory, logic and analog functions on a single chip. The Atmel chips are manufactured through the usage of the most advanced wafer processes that includes BiCMOS, CMOS and Silicon Germanium (SiGe) technologies. It is also found to be concentrating on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.

The AT86RF535B is utilized in the using of a proprietary internal calibration algorithm decreasing product cost and improving manufacturability. The calibration routine is performed between transmit and receive data frames, that is totally independent from the baseband and MAC processor so as to optimize the image and local oscillator (LO) leakage performance characteristics. The fractional-N synthesizer in the AT86RF535B operates a unique phase interpolation divider (PID) rather than the more conventional modulus divider architecture. The PID allows for very good frequency resolution and fast tuning speed. The calibrated VCO can be tuned in less than 10 us to support 100 MHz HFDD operations. The synthesizer has the speed and power advantages of an asynchronous divider and is fully programmable within the frequency range of the radio.

From the company sources it is revealed, that Atmel has been working with HULU. It is a leading OEM/ODM of WiMAX mass-market subscriber units and has included Atmel’s transceiver in its interoperability studies with great success.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Maurizio Hublitz, CTO, HULU AB said, “HULU has chosen the Atmel transceiver due to several technical reasons. The AT86RF535B has the lowest power consumption on the market. This is very important to us as we are developing nomadic OFDM equipment. The Atmel device is technologically sound. We have tested the complete radio in the smallest form-factor using several different base stations and we are very pleased with its performance and cost effectiveness.”

The Vice President and General Manager of Atmel’s RF and automotive business unit Mr. Bob McConnell, commented while talking to the newsmen, “Atmel’s proprietary SiGe BiCMOS process technology provides our designers with the capability to build a better WiMAX radio. You can see the results in the 535.”