Final Year Project Title : IEEE 802.11 MAC Chip
The IEEE 802.11 defines two layers, Physical layer (PHY), which specifies the modulation scheme used and signaling characteristics for the transmission through radio frequencies, and the media access control (MAC) layer, which decides how the medium is used.
Advent of this standard created an explosive demand for the devices which implement 802.11 standard that provides mobility to the users. This project is aimed to build such a device, which complies with this standard, and provide the benefits of the standard to the users in demand.
MAC design includes options such as complete implementation in Hardware or complete implementation in Software or a combination of both. However, such implementations are optimized to meet either of the one of the goals of speed, logic resources, power or area.
In our work, we are dividing the MAC architecture into hardware (which will be embedded along with ASIC RF Baseband and PHY on the NIC card) and software running on the Host Processor. This eliminates the need of a dedicated embedded processor such as ARM for software operations requiring more logic resources higher overall power dissipation. The hardware takes care of the functions, which are time critical. Thus, the proposed design is expected to meet the tradeoffs between speed, logic resources, power or area.
(Note: All Files in pdf)
Study Phase Seminar Delivered at CEDT