Renesas Electronics Corporation unveiled plans to deliver a comprehensive set of advanced Wi-Fi offerings to complement its broad portfolio of industrial and IoT products. Renesas completed its acquisition of Celeno last year and is leveraging that technology to address a wide range of Wi-Fi client and access point applications for Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7.
Renesas is also sampling a powerful, highly integrated, 2 x 2 Wi-Fi/BLE combo chip supporting Wi-Fi 6E tri-band switchable radio (6, 5 and 2.4 GHz), 160 MHz channel bandwidth and up to 2.4 Gbps Data Link Speed. The new low-latency, highly secure chipset includes Bluetooth and BLE 5.2 support, and addresses multimedia streaming applications, IoT gateways and cloud connected devices.
Renesas is also developing a Wi-Fi 6E chipset with unique, patented Wi-Fi doppler imaging technology. This Wi-Fi radar technology depicts the range and doppler signature of people and objects using standard Wi-Fi signals. It eliminates the need for multiple cameras or sensors in home environments and commercial buildings. For example, it can be used to detect the presence and location of people in a room to redirect and optimize air-conditioning flows, saving on energy costs. Another example could be intrusion detection to secured facilities or connected cameras with motion sensing to activate the camera. The combined connectivity and sensing chip is currently scheduled for production in the next 18 months.
Wi-Fi 7, also known as extremely high throughput, will deliver significantly faster throughput by employing faster modulations and double the bandwidth. In the 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi 7 would more than the double the maximum speed and will increase speeds in the 2.4 GHz and 5GHz band by as much as 30 percent. More importantly, some prominent features of Wi-Fi 7 will improve network reliability, latency and user experience. For example, by delivering multi-link operation, devices would monitor multiple links across different bands and provide consolidated operation to optimize interference and retransmission avoidance. Users will benefit from more reliable networks and from lower and more predictable latency. Wi-Fi 7 is expected to launch in 2024 with early adoption in mobile phones, computers and networking devices. Broader adoption in IoT, industrial and consumer multimedia applications will follow.
Renesas’ Wi-Fi 7 offerings will include solutions for home networking, IoT, industrial and consumer multimedia devices.
“Renesas can now offer truly differentiated Wi-Fi solutions that provide maximum performance, security and cost-competitiveness in combination with our industry-leading MCU and MPU offerings,” said Gilad Rozen, Celeno CEO and vice president of Wi-Fi connectivity in Renesas’ IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit. “Our customers are pleased with the direction we have chosen, and we are confident that we will deliver the right products for the market at the right time.”