The RT2883 is an 802.11n 3 transmitter, 3 receiver (3T3R) system on a chip featuring a high performance CPU and a wealth of connectivity interfaces. The RT2853 is a dual band 2.4GHz/5GHz 3T3R transceiver.
The RT2883/RT2853 implement transmit beamforming technology that can determine a client’s distance and location, and control transmitted power and phase to optimize received power at the client. The chipset is compatible with the newly added beamforming clauses in the IEEE’s latest draft 802.11n standard and also implements a proprietary beamforming technique that can be used with any client.
On the receive side, the RT2883/RT2853 supports Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC), Maximum Likelihood Detection (MLD) and Ralink’s proprietary Adaptive Channel Estimation and Equalization (ACE) to ensure robust reception of packets. Also supported is Ralink’s "Video Turbine" proprietary QoS for media streaming.
The RT2883 features a 500 MHz MIPS CPU, Hardware Network Address Translation (NAT), hardware frame aggregation and RGMII, USB 2.0 and PCI Express, SPI, I2C and PCM interfaces.
The RT2883/RT2853 3T3R 802.11n Router reference design kit, which includes a full Linux 2.6 Router software stack, will be sampling in Q2 2009. Pricing was not announced.