Marvell, a provider of storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions, announced support for new Wi-Fi Alliance standard, Wi-Fi Direct, in order to strengthen its position in revolutionary Wi-Fi adoption across cell phones, portable gaming devices, personal media players and other low power mobile devices.

 

The new Wi-Fi Direct specification, which is under the verge of completion, standardizes peer-to-peer connectivity between Wi-Fi enabled devices, thereby simplifying secure peer-to-peer communication between 802.11 enabled devices. This new peer-to-peer communications specification is expected to accelerate Wi-Fi adoption across consumer electronic products.

 

According to Marvell, it has already established itself in the 802.11 WLAN market and has numerous customers shipping 802.11-based gaming devices, cellular handsets, digital cameras, MP3 players, VoIP handsets, PCs and access points.

 

With the support for Wi-Fi Direct specification, Marvell will be capable of enabling these devices to connect to one another directly in a secure and intuitive fashion.

 

Moreover, Marvell also started offering Marvell Mobile Hotspot, or “MMH,” technology, which is a Wi-Fi Direct offering that features a full-featured, fully functional, standards compliant 802.11 a/b/g/n access point implemented entirely within the low-power wireless system on chip.

 

With the help of Marvell’s MMH technology, battery operated consumer electronics can now function as full-featured Wi-Fi access points while concurrently operating as traditional Wi-Fi clients. This capability has encouraged new product categories especially for devices with integrated 802.11 radios that can be expanded upon using Wi-Fi Direct.

 

Officials at Marvell said that it is currently offering evaluation kits for Wi-Fi Direct as a software upgrade on existing and future Wi-Fi products.

 

Partho Mishra, VP and GM of Marvell's embedded and emerging business unit, said, that, as the technology impacts all Wi-Fi enabled devices, consumers will receive lots of benefits.