News

Back at the Netgear 802.11ac event where we got to see some of the first 802.11ac enabled R6300 and R6200 routers, Broadcom told me that the announcement of an 802.11ac combo chip was imminent. That was just under a month ago, and today they've made good on that promise with the announcement of BCM4335, the successor to BCM4334 which includes single spatial stream 802.11ac support. 

This is the latest in Broadcom's combo chip portfolio for smartphones, tablets, and other small form factor mobile devices. We've seen BCM4330 and BCM4334 in a huge number of devices, and no doubt 4335 will follow suit. BCM4335 includes a number of the optional 802.11ac features including 256QAM, short guard interval, beamforming, low density parity check (LDPC), and space-time block coding (STBC). This results in a PHY rate of 433.3 Mbps with 80 MHz channels on 802.11ac.

In addition, BCM4335 includes support for legacy 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n and 5 GHz 802.11a/n (20 and 40 MHz channels). BCM4335 is also manufactured on a 40nm process, same as BCM4334, so power consumption should be relatively similar, and likely better with 802.11ac. The usual combination of Bluetooth 4.0 and FM gets inherited from BCM4334 as well. BCM4335 is currently sampling and will enter production Q1 2013. 

Source: Broadcom






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