Explosive Wi-Fi Growth Drives Market For Value-Added RF Power Amps

Wireless networking is fast becoming the medium of choice in business and consumer communications, and RF component manufacturers have moved quickly to cash in on the increased demand fueled by the growing use of 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs). These networks, commercially referred to as Wi-Fi, are spreading across a broad range of applications in enterprise and home-entertainment markets, with chipset sales expected to reach $953 million in 2005, according to Strategy Analytics.

The fundamental popularity of Wi-Fi is driven by a number of factors that benefit users much the way the first PCs did a generation ago. It answers the need for more flexible network portability while increasing productivity, allowing people to get more done in less time and with fewer resources. Wi-Fi's evolution can be traced from its earliest days as an ambitious technology that took a long time to get off the ground, but that gained traction quickly once structural impediments were removed. Historically, Wi-Fi started as a series of proprietary wireless networking systems dedicated to specific applications. It then moved to standards-based systems in the form of IEEE-approved 802.11 regulations to satisfy the need for greater interoperability.

Initial applications were at the enterprise level, with companies seeking to expand overall network connectivity in such areas as office networking, retail warehousing, and product distribution. Expansion into consumer markets later opened such new possibilities as Internet access, music downloads, and video streaming. These applications quickly led to home connectivity applications integrating digital laptops, printers, TVs, cameras, and all of the necessary infrastructure for information routing. Growing Wi-Fi popularity at both the enterprise and consumer levels has been facilitated by a combination of easy deployment, standards-based chipset/system architectures, increased system interoperability, successful branding of the Wi-Fi name, and less costly engineering/software solutions.