Micro Digital Inc. announced that smxWiFi, first released in June of 2008, has been upgraded to support 802.11n (high speed) and additional chips sets from Ralink. smxWiFi now provides support for USB WiFi dongles using the Ralink RT2500, 2573, and 2870 chipsets. In addition, it now supports PCI bus WiFi cards using the Ralink RT2860 and 2760 chipsets. Support for other chipsets can be added.

This software package is IEEE 802.11 a, b, g, i and n compliant and supports connection to an Access Point (AP) or peer to peer connection. smxWiFi is available with or without security. For security, Open, Shared, WPA-PSK, and WPA2-PSK authentication types are supported and WEP, TKIP, and AES encryption modes are supported.

smxWiFi allows an embedded device developer to add wireless connectivity to an embedded device by plugging in one of the many USB to WiFi adapters or PCI bus WiFi cards available on the market that use the supported Ralink chipsets. smxWiFi operates seamlessly with the Micro Digital smxUSBH host stack, smxNS TCP/IP stack, and SMX RTOS. Together, these products provide an out-of-the-box solution for embedded systems requiring wireless connectivity. They can also be used with other RTOS's.

For the RT2573 chip set with x86 and ISP1761, 205 KBps has been measured. For the RT2870 chip set with x86 and EHCI, performance increases to 300 KBps. For the 2860 PCI chip set with x86, performance is 350 KBps. Security applications reduce the performance considerably unless hardware cryto engines are available. With security and the RT2573 driver, the ROM requirement is about 80 KB and RAM is 25 KB. Hence, smxWiFi is well-suited to small embedded systems.

smxWiFi is available now. The price for a single-product, royalty-free license starts at $7,000 for smxWiFia,b,g, including the RT25xx driver. WEP is $1,000 extra; WPA is $5,000 extra. More information can be found at
the company site.