April 13, 2020 by Luke James
NXP has announced a new portfolio of SoCs with native support for Wi-Fi 6, promising to bring the benefits of the next generation of Wi-Fi to a broader range of products and accelerate adoption of the latest standard.
Announced on April 7, the company’s new portfolio is said to expand the number of products and markets that are able to adopt the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax.
In an announcement, NXP said that the portfolio represents the company’s new end-to-end vision and differentiated technology approach that has been designed to help realise the new era of connectivity innovation for markets like industrial, automotive, IoT, and mobile.
Wi-Fi 6 brings with it a variety of connectivity improvements, including symmetric multi-gigabit uploads and downloads, lower latency, higher capacity, and better power efficiency. With NXP’s new product portfolio, these technical advancements are set to become available for large-scale deployment across several markets.
NXP's Wi-Fi 6 portfolio was organized to expand their selection of products capable of utilizing the latest Wi-Fi standards.
Highlights from the portfolio include:
4x4 and 8x8-stream solutions with integrated Bluetooth 5.
IoT-focused 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 for optimised cost and power.
Concurrent Dual Wi-Fi 2x2+2x2 and Bluetooth 5 AEC-Q100 qualified solutions for applications including telematics, infotainment, automotive, and multimedia streaming.
The portfolio also includes RF front-end solutions based on silicon germanium (SiGe) that can scale Wi-Fi 6 capabilities from low-end to high-end applications.
NXP’s Wi-Fi 6 portfolio has been introduced to meet the expected demand from markets like IoT, automotive, infrastructure, and others. To date, Wi-Fi 6 has been predominately driven by and focused on smartphones.
Without a means to access Wi-Fi 6 options that scale to their needs, manufacturers in these industries will not be able to utilise the technology and benefit from its advancements. NXP’s latest portfolio serves as a family of products that matches the performance and cost needs of these markets and their segments.
It also facilitates the development of products with better battery lives, higher connection reliability, a greater range, and improvement in general performance. In the past, only a handful of products have been able to access these benefits. With NXP’s power-efficient Wi-Fi 6 portfolio, this is set to change.
The news also serves as a reminder that the company is committed to its ongoing efforts to support IoT development. NXP recently released two new microcontrollers for IoT devices and launched a new UWB chipset for smart devices. Using NXP’s EdgeVerse platform, manufacturers can accelerate the development of these products.
