NXP Semiconductors N.V. announced it is laying the foundation for a new era of Wi-Fi 6 devices that can operate in the 6 GHz band with its new CW641 Wi-Fi 6E Tri-Band system-on-chip (SoC). With increasing congestion in the legacy 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, the U.S. FCC has approved 1.2 GHz of unlicensed spectrum for the 6 GHz band along with other regions around the world, which will transform the Wi-Fi landscape. NXP is introducing a Wi-Fi 6E device that will make use of this 6 GHz band and extend Wi-Fi capacity by bringing higher throughout, increased capacity, reliability and improved latency.
Designed for access points and service provider gateways, the CW641 unlocks increased speeds of over 4Gbps and multi-user performance in the new 6 GHz band, providing greater capacity and lower latency, which dramatically improves the Wi-Fi user experience. Adding 6 GHz capabilities to gateway platforms gives service providers options to efficiently partition available bandwidth across devices to ensure optimum user experience for a wide range of applications. Mission critical, high bandwidth, low latency applications like mesh back haul and cloud gaming are ideal for migration to 6 GHz, freeing up the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands for other lower bandwidth applications.
NXP’s new Wi-Fi 6E Tri-Band SoC makes it possible to take full advantage of the transformative 6 GHz spectrum to boost the performance of in-home mesh networks, streaming high-resolution music and videos, online gaming, video calling, digital downloads, data-heavy web content and numerous other use cases. Beyond access point applications, the CW641 SoC sets the stage for high performance Wi-Fi 6E applications across consumer, automotive, industrial and IoT.
Key features of CW641 include:
• 4x4 Wi-Fi device with four-spatial streams
• Supports 6 GHz, 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz operation
• 160/80/40/20 MHz channel bandwidth
• Peak PHY rate of 4.8 Gbps
• Uplink and downlink OFDMA
• Uplink and downlink MU-MIMO
“NXP’s Wi-Fi 6E chipset combines multi-gigabyte data rates, low latency and higher multi-user performance to deliver on customer demands for 6 GHz products that address the decade-long need for the greater capacity required in today’s wireless networking applications,” said Larry Olivas, head of Marketing for NXP’s Wireless Connectivity Solutions. “As our first Wi-Fi 6E SoC to support the 6 GHz spectrum, the CW641 enhances the overall Wi-Fi experience by making less congested airwaves available to routers and gateways for multi-device, data-intensive applications. Our new chipset makes it possible to take advantage of this new uncongested bandwidth, which will provide increased performance with less interference for devices on the Wi-Fi 6E network.”
“The increased availability of unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi is the most exciting and transformative change to the Wi-Fi landscape in recent times, bringing about much higher throughput, greater capacity, increased reliability and improved quality of service, all of which will help enable new wireless services while addressing key challenges currently facing the technology,” said Andrew Zignani, principal analyst at ABI Research. “However, in order to realize this potential, the Wi-Fi industry requires new Wi-Fi 6E chipsets that can effectively address the varied demands of the market. Solutions such as NXP’s latest CW641 Wi-Fi 6E chipset will play a fundamental role in enabling the 6 GHz infrastructure rollout, allowing a varied ecosystem of end devices, applications and services to take advantage of this enormous new opportunity for Wi-Fi.”