A joint reference design that is powered by the industry leading high-performance CS3516 Network Processor from Cortina and the industry leading 802.11n WiFi solution RT2880 from Ralink has been announced by Cortina Systems, Inc and Ralink Technology. The reference design will be publicly demonstrated at the upcoming CEATEC in Japan.

Vice President and General Manager of Digital Home Business Unit, Cortina Systems, Inc., Dr. Stewart Wu, declared: “Consumers are finding new uses for networking in the digital home, such as networked picture frames, internet radio and IP surveillance.” Wu continued: “OEMs are looking for integrated, high performance solutions. Working closely with Ralink, we are enabling system vendors quicker time to market for their network multimedia products with a comprehensive hardware and software reference design.”

President of Ralink Technology, Rick Jeng, stated: “Continuing our innovation and development of wireless LAN chipset solutions, Ralink is thrilled to collaborate with Cortina to provide a reference design that addresses the high performance needs from the consumer and system manufactures.”

The joint reference design enables 270 Mbps aggregate concurrent dual band throughput and up to 1 Gbps WAN-to-LAN routing wire-to-wire; and 200 Mbps wire-to-WiFi. The board also supports Motion JPEG, MPEG4, and MP3 decoding for applications such as internet radio, network picture frame, and NAS-based IP surveillance central stations. The reference board is based on the popular CS3516 Router Gateway NAS Reference Design Kit from Cortina and the RT2880 Reference Design Board from Ralink. The joint reference design includes an integrated Board Support Package that provides system designers a unified Linux kernel and application software suite.

To enable a multitude of high-performance and cost-effective draft 802.11n applications, the RT2880 SOC combines Ralink’s 2T3R MAC/BBP, a 266 MHz Mips4KEc CPU core, a Gigabit Ethernet MAC, and a PCI host/device. The RT2880 has two RF companion chips, the RT2820 for 2.4G-band operation and the RT2850 for dual band 2.4G or 5G operation. The chipset, in addition to the traditional AP/router application, can be implemented as a WLAN “intelligent” NIC, drastically reducing the load on the host SOC, such as DSL/Cable or Multimedia Applications processors.

The Cortina Systems® CS3516 Network Processor provides superior performance and functionality for Router Gateway, VoIP, IP Set Top Box, NAS, and other SME and SOHO applications. The device has a 32-bit ARM9 RISC Processor with up to 400 MIPS total performance. The device integrates a full-featured hardware crypto engine, dual USB 2.0 hosts or clients, two 10/100/1000 Ethernet MACs, dual IDE or SATA interfaces, a 66 MHz 32-bit PCI interface, and direct interfaces to color LCD and SLIC modules.