The IW612 from NXP Semiconductors is a 2.4/5 GHz Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6 + BLE 5.2 + 802.15.4 Triple-Radio single-chip solution. It is optimized for a broad array of IoT and industrial applications in smart home, smart devices and accessories, smart appliances, smart energy, industrial automation, gateways and many more. This highly integrated chipset lowers system cost and has a minimum external BOM while achieving efficient coexistence between all internal radios as well as external radios, such as LTE. This radio has an integrated power amplifier (PA), low noise amplifier (LNA) and Tx/Rx switch and supports UL/DL MU-MIMO and OFDMA features.
The IW612 includes a full-feature Wi-Fi subsystem powered by NXP’s 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) technology bringing higher throughput, better network efficiency, lower latency and improved range over previous generation Wi-Fi standards. The Wi-Fi subsystem integrates a Wi-Fi MAC, baseband, and direct-conversion radio with integrated PA, LNA and transmit/receive switch removing the need for an RF front-end module (FEMs) saving cost and reducing system complexity.
The IW612 also integrates an independent Bluetooth 5.2 and 802.15.4 subsystem that supports Thread and Zigbee mesh networks. It features Bluetooth profiles such as hands free (HFP), advanced audio distribution profile (A2DP) for audio streaming as well as additional profiles like dual wideband speech (WBS). For Bluetooth Low Energy, the IW612 enables 2 Mbit/s high-speed data rate, long range, extended advertising, AoA/AoD and mesh. It also supports LE Audio using isochronous channels for a better overall audio experience.
The chipset integrates dedicated CPUs and memory for both the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth/802.15.4 subsystems, which enable real time, independent protocol processing. It can be connected to external host processor using SDIO for Wi-Fi, UART for Bluetooth and SPI for 802.15.4. This chipset has an efficient power management system that supports deep sleep low-power mode.
