On the eve of this week's biannual Intel Developer Forum, Intel  announced the second delay of its latest wireless LAN silicon, highlighting the company's struggles to firmly establish a foothold in the wireless arena.

The conference, in San Jose, is expected to draw more than 4,000 hardware designers and software developers who specialize in Intel-based products. Twenty-five sessions, spread over at least four IDF tracks, will cover everything from global spectrum policy reform to power management technologies for mobile WLAN devices.

A troop of Intel executives is expected to unveil details about an array of wireless and mobile technologies, such as:

• The next generation of Pentium M mobile processors.

• Research on creating seamless roaming for mobile users over different Internet connection zones.

• A broadband demonstration using 802.11 WLAN and 802.16 fixed wireless technologies.

• A road map for Intel's future 802.11a, 802.11a/b and 802.11g WLAN chips.

But Intel will have to update that road map to get around the pothole that just opened up.

Intel earlier this year said it would ship in the third quarter a combination 802.11a/b WLAN chip, so that a Centrino notebook user could connect to either a 5GHz, 54M bit/sec 802.11a network or a 2.4GHz, 11M bit/sec 802.11b network. But last week, the company confirmed the chip will ship later in 2003, the second delay this year. Intel's first 802.11a chip is due out soon. An Intel spokesman says the 2.4GHz 54M bit/sec 802.11g chip will be ready by year-end. Intel has said it will ship a chip that can handle 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g by June 2004.

Rivals lead the pack

But all of those products are months, even years, behind Intel's WLAN rivals. Two of them, Atheros Communications and Broadcom, timed announcements for this week of their latest WLAN products, alongside of which Intel's look pale. Both vendors' chips are used widely wherever WLAN vendors want more than 802.11b, which is all Intel currently supports.

Atheros' new chipsets, one supporting 802.11a/b/g, the other for 802.11b/g, feature advances that cut power consumption by 60%, and roughly double the ranges of the previous products. In one 802.11g test, range increased to 2,400 feet compared with about 800. Both chips also have a special, proprietary feature to reach a throughput of up to 90M bit/sec, compared with roughly 22M to 27M bit/sec in a standard 802.11g network. But this requires Atheros chips on each end of the connection.

Click to see: Uphill battle

The WLAN chips used in Centrino are not Intel products. Centrino, announced with great fanfare in February, is a collection of products. Those products include Intel's well-regarded Pentium M processor, an Intel memory controller chipset and a WLAN interface cobbled together with three chips from four companies: Philips for the radio, Texas Instruments for the baseband and a joint Intel-Symbol Technologies project for the MAC chip.