The IEEE 802.11b Standard Compliant Medium Access Controller 
Overview
The SiS160 is a single-chip wireless LAN Medium Access Controller (MAC), which fully provides the feature and functionality needed for the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.11b standard. The SiS160 applies the innovative MAC core engine architecture and is designed to provide good performance with minimum power consumption and enhance the advantages of robust system and cost-performance effectively. It is targeted at competitive price-performance, better power management, high volume mobile PC module, PCMCIA adapter card, and build-in notebook system.
The SiS160 chip contains a 32-bit host bus interface which is compliant with Cardbus v7.1, Mini-PCI v1.2 and PCI v2.3, a MAC core unit and WEP encrypted engine as well as a physical attachment interface (PAI). Additionally external interfaces include serial EEPROM, GPIOs, LEDs and radio control. The radio interface provides digital and analog signals for transmitting and receiving frame data by means of 2.4GHz radio. The PAI supports direct-sequence spread spectrum physical interface. The SiS160 can collocate with the Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) baseband processor which followed IEEE 802.11b standard, and implements as a half duplex wireless LAN system supporting all data rates as well as the modulation schemes with differential phase shift keying such as DBPSK (Differential Binary Phase Shift Keying) at 1Mbps, DQPSK (Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) at 2Mbps and CCK (Complementary Code Keying) at 5.5Mbps and maximum 11Mbps.
The SiS160 also supports power management feature for reducing system power consumption. This feature enables MAC, baseband processor, and RF components to enter sleep mode so that battery life could be effectively lengthened. It is important when wireless local area network (WLAN) devices are adopted for mobile equipments and laptops.
The SiS160 performs frame exchange protocol, transmit and receive processing, frame encryption and decryption and error recovery capability as defined in the IEEE 802.11b standards. It supports BSS and IBSS operation under DCF (Distributed Coordination Functions). Designing wireless protocol systems using SiS160 is made easier with build-in flexibility, better software device drivers, the evaluation board, and the completely documents.