Quantenna’s 10G Wi-Fi chip
Hot on the heels of Qualcomm’s MU-MIMO announcement, Quantenna Communications says it is at work on the next generation of Wi-Fi chipsets, the world’s first 10G Wi-Fi chip. The company says the first 10G Wi-Fi chipsets will be available in 2015, including support for MIMO configurations up to 8×8.
“Quantenna’s 8×8 architecture with adaptive beamforming demonstrates that the ‘massive MIMO’ promise of significantly higher throughput, robustness, and reduced interference can be realized in practice,” said Andrea Goldsmith, Stephen Harris Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. “This architecture will also significantly enhance the capabilities of MU-MIMO, allowing it to support interference-free transmission to many more devices simultaneously. These technology advances will transform the landscape of applications and devices that Wi-Fi can support. As we move into an era of exponentially-growing video usage and the Internet of Things, the 8×8 architecture and MU-MIMO technologies will become essential in all high-performance Wi-Fi devices.”
Broadcom’s 5G WiFi XStream
Meanwhile, Broadcom has a new 5G Wi-Fi chipset that it says will be in production this quarter. The company expects its superfast chipsets to be ready for consumer devices by the holiday season, while Qualcomm has projected that its chips will be shipping inside devices in early 2015.
Broadcom’s 5G WiFi XStream is a 802.11ac MIMO platform that offers download speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps. It includes software that can identify mobile traffic in order to prioritize video, which requires the most bandwidth and processing power. It separates coexisting 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi devices into distinct frequencies, so that multiple Wi-Fi-connected devices in a single location are less likely to compete for bandwidth.
In other recent chip news, analysts predict strong growth for sensor hubs, and Freescale tightens its grip on ARM technology…
Sensing the future
The proliferation of smartphone sensors has created a robust market for sensor hubs. These are chips that process the information collected by various smartphone sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, or GPS sensor. Worldwide shipments of sensor hubs in 2014 will reach a projected 658.4 million units, according to IHS iSuppli, up 154% from 259.6 million units last year.
“A sensor hub is a low-power processor that can be used to perform calculations on data from sensors, the hub thereby saving power on a device by off-loading such tasks from the power-intensive application processor,” said Marwan Boustany, senior analyst for MEMS & sensors at IHS. “The use of sensor hubs is increasingly crucial because of the push for ‘always on’ sensors used for activity monitoring, voice-command operation and contextual awareness.”
Freescale launches two new ARM-based processors
Freescale is showing a clear commitment to ARM-based architecture. After announcing plans to buy Mindspeed’s ARM processor business, the Texas company last week launched two new ARM-based processors. The company says its newest offerings use a Layerscape architecture e to deliver a software-defined approach to advance virtualized networks. The QorIQ LS2085A and LS2045A SoCs incorporate eight and four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 cores respectively, running up to 2GHz; DDR4 memory controllers; eight 10Gb interfaces; and eight 1Gb interfaces with L2 switch capabilities.
“By all appearances, Freescale is moving beyond (if not away from) the PowerPC business in a big way and jumping on to ARM-based solutions,” said Will Strauss, founder and principal analyst at Forward Concepts.
“We absolutely remain committed to PowerPC, and we continue to invest in it,” responded Freescale’s public relations manager Jack Taylor. “We are embracing ARM, but we are well positioned to support both architectures.”
Follow me on Twitter.
