At Redpine Signals, we have put in over 500 person-years of effort so far, spread over the past seven years, in the innovation, development, and perfecting of our wireless technology. With innovations and expertise in all pertinent areas - spanning OFDM, MIMO, power efficient CMOS RF transceiver and Power Amplifiers, Multi-thread processing architectures  and system-level power save techniques – Redpine has brought forth products that uniquely address the requirements of converged wireless. Over 10 patents awarded, 54 Filed and over 100 patents in our pipeline are the result of our approach to fundamental innovation in technology.

Ultra-low Power 802.11n Wireless LAN Technology

Starting with providing a wireless alternative to the tethered connection of notebook computers to a local network, 802.11 WLAN, or Wi-Fi, has gone on to be the method of choice in the provision of network connectivity to a diverse range of devices including mobile phones, cameras, consumer electronic devices, industrial and medical equipment, sensor networks, and home entertainment systems, among others.

Today’s highly crowded unlicensed wireless bands demand that they be used efficiently – and emerging standards like 802.11n address this need, and that of increased throughput. At the same time, battery operated devices have emphasized the need for minimizing the consumption of energy in the process of transferring data wirelessly. Solutions that implement the 802.11 standards must, therefore, be designed and built to provide wireless networking benefits at low cost of silicon size and power consumption.

Redpine’s key philosophy is that differentiated solutions can only be provided with an in-depth understanding and control of the technology blocks that constitute a SoC and system product. For example, Redpine has developed its processing architectures in-house that are used for protocol implementation as well as for key applications – the ThreadArch™ multi-threaded processor for optimal power performance and a 16–bit, ultra compact ISA based MAC processor for area efficiency. Our technology is uniquely innovated in all the key areas of 802.11 based solutions, including MIMO, OFDM, low power techniques, multi-threaded embedded processor architecture, wireless algorithms, CMOS RF and PA, and silicon optimization. Redpine has pioneered the introduction of network capacity enhancing 802.11n to the realm of battery constrained devices.

Wireless Convergence Technology

Redpine’s convergence technology includes one of the most silicon-efficient implementations of a converged OFDMA based mobile WiMAX and OFDM based WLAN solution. Mobile WiMAX, providing broadband wireless access over the last mile, is a perfect complement to WLAN in the provision of continuous network connectivity for a mobile user. Redpine’s technology in this area – Lite-NMAX™ – includes WiMAX functionality that is compliant to Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 profiles, including downlink MIMO, HARQ, CTC and beamforming with uplink sounding. It is an interference-optimal design with innovative signal processing for best throughputs in dense single-frequency network deployments. In 802.11n mode, it provides a 300 Mbps two-stream MIMO downlink with all mandatory and optional features of the draft standard including STBC and beamforming support for longer range, and a power-optimal single-stream transmitter ideal for handheld devices.

Apart from WiMAX and WLAN, Redpine’s technology also encompasses 3GPP-LTE, or Long Term Evolution. There is a clear trend of broadband access heading for widespread adoption into mobile devices, and LTE is one of the candidate technologies that can bring this about. Like Mobile WiMAX, LTE is also based on OFDMA and MIMO, and Redpine’s technology provides for an extremely silicon and memory efficient implementation of converged WiMAX, WLAN and LTE solutions. Using the same proprietary, multi-threaded processor platform and wireless processing hardware, Redpine’s convergence approach fully optimizes the implementation of the respective protocol stacks and communication methods of these standards.