Low Power Wirelesss SOC (System on Chip), WIFI

It has been long known that WIFI client devices are power hogs.  Does not really matter if it is in a laptop, but when in a portable device there simply are limits.  Thus, companies like Symbol now Motorola, in their PDAS for the past eight years have used PSP (Power Saving Polling), modes versus CAM (Continuos Aware Mode), to conserve battery life.  This is definitely helped.  Other medical device developers have figured out ways to switch power on and off so rapidly, that still a connection is present, thus again saving power as the end goal.  Medical device companies want to embedd WIFI, but these portable devices in the the healthcare mobility model are struggling with power versus use model.  Example medical telemetry, ideally you want at least I think four days on a battery so that the clinician is not encumbered with having to change batteries all the time. A new company seems to have solved this WIFI power issue and could perhaps be competitor to the whole 802.15.4 (Zigbee) marketplace maybe in the BAS space.   They claim 10 years of power usage on single AA battery.   www.gainspan.com  I had conversations with them today.  The GS10101 device along with its embedded software stack is designed to be be highly integrated ultra low power wireless system on a chip (SOC), which contains an 802.11 radio, media access controller (MAC), baseband processor, on chip flash memory, SRAM, and an application processor all on a single package. It provides IEEE 1588, location awareness, all the standard WPA2 and AES hardware encryption, plus as a package the SW, APIs, and SDK.