Engim Delivers Industry's First Simultaneous Multi-Channel WLAN Switching Engine Silicon; Dramatically Scales, Simplifies Wi-Fi Networking.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 14, 2003

EN-3000 Helps Access Point Vendors Support Wi-Fi's Soaring Enterprise and Hot Spot Usage; Simultaneously Communicates Over Multiple 802.11 Channels Within Each Band to Redefine WLAN Infrastructure Capacity, Manageability and Operational Simplicity.

Engim, Inc., developers of next generation silicon technology that redefines the performance and simplicity of wireless LAN infrastructure, today introduced the EN-3000, the first multi-channel, multi-band wireless LAN switching chipset that enables access point manufacturers to offer a new class of solutions that will support Wi-Fi's rapidly escalating adoption rates. The EN-3000 enables a next generation of access points that simultaneously communicate on multiple channels of 802.11b/g, and multiple channels of 802.11a, enabling the introduction of access points with capacity exceeding 500 Mbps. Engim's advanced WLAN monitoring and management features eliminate the operational and management complexities that arise in deploying and scaling today's 802.11 network infrastructure by allowing access points to also monitor the network and intelligently self-heal the network.

According to industry watchers and integrators, simplifying WLAN network operations and substantially improving their performance and consistency have - until now - been beyond the capabilities of WLAN silicon vendors. With enterprise and hot spot Wi-Fi usage rates uniformly projected to grow several-fold over the next few years, the EN-3000's standards-based wideband capacity and comprehensive network management features are expected to drive its rapid integration into a new array of high performance, innovation-rich access points.

"Bringing 'industrial-strength' capacity and manageability into access points will have an effect on the WLAN market parallel to that of the introduction of Ethernet switches in the early '90s. These switches groomed network traffic and offered new levels of raw network bandwidth. As a result, they sharply expanded LAN deployment and quickly displaced earlier generations of hubs," noted Aaron Vance of Synergy Research.

According to The Burton Group's Michael Disabato, "Managing and scaling today's 802.11 networks is a very complex task. Most network managers lack experience managing a meshed radio environment. As the number of WLAN users and access points grows, factors such as random interference sources, usage spikes, rogue elements, shifting 802.11 client mix and other RF challenges will make life tough for even an experienced WLAN network manager... far more than wire line networks ever did. We need a new class of infrastructure that stabilizes the network's availability and performance, and automates radio frequency management for WLANs."

The EN-3000: Bringing Unprecedented Scale and Simplicity to Wi-Fi Networks

The EN-3000 incorporates several new technologies to exponentially scale WLAN infrastructure capacity and introduce new levels of manageability. Engim's unique Wideband Spectral Processing technology comprehensively captures and digitizes the available RF spectrum, and intelligently isolates and mitigates RF interference. It continually monitors the RF environment, suppressing and compensating for RF interference, and allowing users and network managers to realize huge gains in WLAN capacity.

Unlike today's silicon solutions, which are limited to operating on only a single WLAN channel at a time, Engim's multi-band, multi-channel scalable chipset can capture and process the available WLAN spectrum, supporting simultaneous communications over multiple 802.11b/g and multiple 802.11a WLAN channels. Conventional architectures based on single channel WLAN chipsets cannot scale to support multi-channel operation in access points due to the self-interference that results from operating on adjacent channels. Engim solves this fundamental scaling problem with innovative RF, analog and digital technology that manages and suppresses RF interference at its source.

The EN-3000's advanced programmability and software functionality enables Intelligent Channel Association, which maximizes system throughput by intelligently associating clients to strategic channels based on the individual client's signal integrity, 802.11 standard, traffic type, and traffic load. This prevents slower data rate users from reducing the throughput of all clients on the network, and provides substantial performance gains that are particularly important to ensure the throughput, stability and Quality of Service of performance-sensitive applications such as VoWIP (Voice over Wireless Internet Protocol).

Engim's EN-3000 complements its unprecedented capacity with unique RF monitoring capabilities that extend well beyond today's single-channel WLAN products. The EN-3000 captures large amounts of spectrum to create an accurate representation of the RF environment. The EN-3000 couples this knowledge of the RF environment with extensible programmable control to enable a vast array of powerful new WLAN services. As the foundation for a new generation of feature-rich access points, the EN-3000 enables vendor innovation in key areas such as WLAN security, fault-tolerance, stability and scalability comparable to that of wireline networks.

Scott Lindsay, Engim Vice President of Marketing, concluded: "Two years ago, several of the wireless industry s most talented, visionary and pragmatic professionals foresaw the effects of 802.11's aggressive growth, and formed Engim. With today's introduction of the EN-3000, we and our vendor partners are working together to realize their vision: infrastructure solutions that mark 802.11's coming of age, which provide users with true wireline performance and control in the wireless domain."

Availability

System developer kits for the EN-3000 chip set are available immediately, and are currently in use in strategic access point vendor development environments.

About Engim, Inc.

Engim, Inc. is a fabless developer of wireless system-on-chip technology that fundamentally redefines the performance and capacity of broadband wireless communications systems. Engim's revolutionary Multi-Channel WLAN Switching Engine chipset forms the foundation for a new generation of very high performance, cost-effective WLAN infrastructure products that simultaneously aggregate traffic from multiple 802.11 channels, dramatically increasing bandwidth and data throughput, simplifying ongoing network operations and making a whole new range of features and functionality available to users at low cost. Engim's solutions are designed by world renowned experts in RF, analog and digital communications IC design from organizations such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) and Motorola (NYSE: MOT). Formed in 2001, Engim is privately held and is funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and private investors. For more information, please visit www.engim.com.