Lantiq rolls G.hn home net chips

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Lantiq rolled out the industry's second family of home networking chips complaint with the new ITU G.hn standard to drive data over powerline, coax or twisted pair networks. The Lantiq XWAY HNX chips support data rates up to a Gbit/second using a 100 MHz channel.

The Lantiq products are part of a growing trend to hybrid home networks to enable connecting any systems to any service. The devices come with drivers for other Lantiq chips, including gateway processors and controllers for 802.11n, DECT, VoIP and analog voice.

Sigma Devices rolled out the first G.hn chips late last year. Companies such as Atheros have debuted hybrid home network designs supporting Wi-Fi and HomePlug powerline nets.

“In Lantiq’s vision for connectivity in the digital home, we see standards-based wire line and wireless technologies working as one single network to provide the best possible quality-of-service, reach and flexibility throughout a household,” said Christian Wolff, chief executive of Lantiq, speaking in a press release.

The company claims its quality-of-service features operate over G.hn, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, DSL and passive optical networks. The chips provide real-time diagnostics, automatically select the optimal network to avoid noise and support spectrum management features.

The HNX 156 and HNX 176 transceivers support the 25, 50 and 100 MHz band plans defined in the G.hn standard. They include a MIPS core, Gigabit Ethernet PHY and switch and PCI Express interface.

Lantiq will sell a G.hn powerline networking evaluation kit beginning January 31 for $5,000.