CEVA has unveiled its new RivieraWaves RW-AX family of 802.11ax Wi-Fi intellectual property (IP), targeting client devices, the smart home and network infrastructure. Building on its market leadership in Wi-Fi IP, CEVA is the first company to offer licensable 802.11ax solutions, providing its customers with a comprehensive platform to integrate the latest Wi-Fi standard into their next-generation product designs.
With the proliferation of smart phones, over-the-top boxes and smart home devices which rely on Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi spectrum has become increasingly congested. This leads to below-par service and reduced bandwidth for users, particularly in dense environments. Wi-Fi 802.11ax not only provides 25% data rate improvements over 802.11ac but also much needed innovations to aid spectrum efficiency and network capacity. These include the use of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for bandwidth sharing and uplink Multi-User MIMO capabilities for more symmetrical data loads.
Moreover, with the addition of other new features such as wake-time scheduling, this latest generation of Wi-Fi also addresses the needs of IoT and low power devices, offering greater efficiency and lower power consumption. As a result, 802.11ax in a slim 1x1 configuration is an ideal future-proofing replacement for 802.11n in ultra-low power IoT devices.
The new RivieraWaves RW-AX family includes:
- RW-AX Low Power: This 11ax 20MHz platform is ideal for small, low power IoT devices, including wearables.
- RW-AX High Performance: The 802.11ax 1x1 and 2x2 platforms with symmetrical Multi-User MIMO are tailored for high performance applications such as smartphones, tablets, set top box and smart home access points.
- RW-AX Multi-Gig: Highest performance 802.11ax up to 4x4, addressing the most advanced use cases including access points, media gateways and Wi-Fi offload in small cells.
Each RivieraWaves Wi-Fi solution incorporates PHY modem functions and MAC functions, including Lower MAC (LMAC) and Full MAC software protocol stacks. The IP is provided with an integration-ready platform containing an optional open-source processor and is operating-system-agnostic, simplifying deployment in SoC/ASSP designs. RivieraWaves Wi-Fi is widely deployed in consumer and IoT devices with many of the world's leading semiconductors companies and OEMs, targeting a broad range of connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, wearables, consumer electronics, smart home, industrial and automotive applications.
The initial members of the RivieraWaves RW-AX family will be available for licensing in the second quarter of 2018. For more information, click here.
