Atheros's single-chip 802.11g may move company into consumer products, cell phones: All chipmakers are constantly vying for the cheapest, least power hungry, most full-featured silicon to sell to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) who incorporate their chips into the products that end users buy.

Cheaper chips mean higher margins or lower end-user pricing for the OEM: the former boosts profits, the latter can goose sales. Less power usage means that chips find their way into more devices that have limited battery life, like handhelds and cell phones. Full-featured chips mean there's no compromise.

Atheros is trying to meet all three factors with their new single-chip 802.11g product. The cost is about 40 percent less than their previous two-chip product, and the company's vice president of marketing and business development, Colin Macnab, said in an interview today that there were no features cut (or added) from the more expensive product.

The new chip will premier next quarter at a price of about $12 for quantities of 10,000 or more (a typical chip volume price break) and about $5 for the other support circuitry. At under $20, this compares to under $30 for their previous set.

In a market in which PC Cards sell for $30 to $50, a drop of $10 in the component pricing could allow them huge inroads into more commodity markets. It also allows Atheros to have a leg up on other makers; Broadcom's all-in-one chip is 802.11b only, as far as has been announced so far.

Atheros's Macnab explained that the company viewed their 802.11g single-chip AR5005G as a technological accomplishment, partly because they managed to retain all the features and partly because of the manufacturing process they're using, CMOS, which is the most widely used form of integrated circuit manufacture available. (Atheros, like many 802.11 chipmakers, is a fabless firm which contracts out the actual manufacture.)

Macnab believes Atheros is far ahead of the competition. "From our point of view and our customers’ point of view, we’ve yet to see [a similar product] in captivity."

Atheros sees this product as eventually breaking the price barrier that will allow it to be used widely in consumer electronics. With a short-range, high-speed standard for the incompatible ultrawideband (UWB) technology in the works, Macnab noted that the two could be complementary technologies.

But, he said, "When you look at where we see these products being used in data networking and moving into the consumer range, a 10-meter range is a non-starter." Ten meters is viewed in the current IEEE 802.15.3a task group as the outside edge of the highest speeds for UWB.

The AR5005G includes Atheros's Super G featureset, which has the 108 Mbps turbo mode that employs two Wi-Fi channels simultaneously. Macnab carefully avoided using the term Wi-Fi in our interview, saying "802.11" and "802.11g" almost exclusively.