You may not know who Atheros is, but you've probably used the company's chips. Along with Broadcom and Intel, the company is one of the top makers of Wi-Fi chips for routers, laptops, and consumer electronics. Today Atheros announced a new Wi-Fi chip family called Align, supporting 802.11n tech in a fashion that will make the faster, longer range 11n as inexpensive as today's ultra-cheap 802.11g products which still flood store shelves.

The basic gist: 802.11n uses a technology called MIMO, which stands for "multiple in, multiple out." Multiples of data streams, that is, spent from multi-antenna routers to multi-antenna laptops clients, for example. The maximum in the 802.11n spec is 4 by 4 (four antennas on either end). No product on the market today exceeds three streams, and the majority handle only two-- Atheros Xspan chip is one of them. Either way, that's a lot of data, and accounts or the data-rate as high as 300+ Megabits per second that is claimed for 11n (that's with 2 streams).

Do you really need multiple streams of data? Atheros says no. Align supports just one. That keeps the price down to 11g levels, providing a "single spatial stream" using 11n. You get the benefits of 11n--better distance, faster throughput, and it even bounces off walls more effectively--without paying through the nose. Align even uses less power than 11g. Atheros wants no more legacy devices with 11g on store shelves by this time next year, while remaining backward compatible.

How well will this single stream 11n perform? Atheros claims in its own tests that the data rate went as high as 150Mbps - about three times what you get with standard 11g (rated at 54Mbps). Double the channel size to 40MHz, another special feature of the 11n spec, and Atheros says speeds hit 5 times that of 11g. Atheros director of marketing says point blank, "Align is much faster and, because of 11n technology, more efficient than 11g." All of that remains to be seen in our future testing in PC Magazine Labs, of course.

Align will come in three designs, for routers, laptops, and smaller consumer electronics. Each is meant to make it easy for product manufacturers to switch current 11g products to the Align with 11n. But you can't just go buy an Atheros Align chip and slap it into your current router or laptop at home. Atheros only sells to hardware makers, and isn't exactly forthcoming about who will be using Align in products when it becomes available in early 2009. They did tell me the company is working hard to make sure Align has "a large franchise" in notebooks and netbooks in the $500 dollar range. All of which today come with 11g to keep the price low.

The future for Align will also include the move to mobile, as handset makers are particularly sensitive to not wanting multiple antennas taking up space inside their products.

If you're wondering when the perpetually-in-draft-mode 11n will actually be ratified by the IEEE, Atheros says to expect that in December... of 2009. There's still some outstanding issues among the propeller heads. Not that it has stopped the network vendors from going all in on 11n technology. In fact, 11n routers are now 34% of the router market, compared to 17 percent last year; 11g routers went from 57 to 49 percent.