4. Attack of the Taiwanese wireless chipmakers

I think I saw the future, and it doesn't bode well for U.S. wireless chipmakers, at least not for commodity 802.11b and 11g wireless products. I always make a point to find out the chipset used in wireless products and my visit to Computex was no exception. What I found, though, surprised me.

As I made my way through the show, I was struck by what seemed like a total shift to home-grown wireless chipsets. The vendors of choice were no longer Broadcom and Conexant (PRISM), or even Marvell, which has seen some recent design wins into Linksys and ASUS gear. But instead, Inprocomm, Realtek (which won a RaLink appeared in design after design.

The only U.S. company appearing to hold its own is Atheros, given the number of "Super G" products that I saw. But my impression could be flawed given that I found OvisLink using 108Mbps to describe the speed of its TI wOne-based products!

Speaking of TI, I had numerous vendors tell me that the company is using very aggressive pricing on its 802.11g chipset to try to get back into the market. That tactic hasn't been successful with one company, however, who cited the ability to get a more reliable supply of devices from local, i.e. Taiwanese, vendors.

The only product that I found with the telltale "125" in its name indicating the use of Broadcom's Afterburner chipset was the new ASUS WL500GX. Conexant's PRISM chipsets (still sporting the Intersil logo!) were found in numerous 11g products from MSI and in an outdoor AP that Senao had opened up for display.

So it would appear that an 11b / 11g chipset price war is well underway as the design and manufacturing expertise become more widespread and these devices move into commodity status. This also presents Atheros, Broadcom and Conexant's decisions to link their latest 11g throughput enhancement technologies to different chipsets in a new light, i.e. an attempt to preserve market share.