But Cypress believes its latency of less than 8 milliseconds (with four nodes) will give the chip an edge in wireless gaming. "The gaming community has repeatedly demanded latencies of under 30 ms — we're way under that," said Norm Taffe, managing director of Cypress' Wireless Business Unit. "We can guarantee 20 ms across seven nodes."

Given the globally fractured nature of the human-interface-device and gaming markets, with 27-, 433- and 900-MHz devices in play in different locales, Taffe pointed to the unifying potential for the chip. Operation at 2.45 GHz is allowed by governments everywhere, so the chip cuts across geopolitical borders, he said.

Similar in many ways to Bluetooth, the CY694X uses a frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum scheme with 1,600 hops/second over 79 channels in a 1-MHz band. Unlike Bluetooth, it uses 2FSK modulation (vs. GMSK) and 10/15 Hamming-code forward error correction for a maximum data rate of 217.6 kbits/s over a range of 10 meters.

"We saw Bluetooth as overkill for many of these applications in terms of cost, software development, power consumption and link complexity," said Taffe, "so we decided to customize it. We can hit a lower price point than Bluetooth and are ready to roll now," with full reference designs and software for keyboards, mice and gaming consoles.

The single chip comprises a 0.25-micron BiCMOS RF transceiver and a 0.25-micron CMOS baseband portion that does setup and breakdown of links, packet framing and error checking, and any real-time operations. The baseband also includes an applications engine. The only external component needed is a front-end bandpass filter, which Taffe expects to have integrated in the near future.

The chip consumes less than 10 microamps in standby. Its power amplifier output of 4 dBm translates to 0 dBm at the antenna (like Bluetooth).

The chip is sampling now, priced at $3.92 in high volume, "but we expect to drop to under $3.50 by the second quarter of '03," said Taffe. Volume shipments are expected by March.