CEVA Expands Portfolio of Wi-Fi APs with Wi-Fi 6/6E IP

Industry’s First Wi-Fi 6/6E Access Point IP Targets Wi-Fi Adoption in Smart Home, Enterprise, Industrial, Automotive and IoT

CEVA, the leading global licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies and integrated IP solutions, announces the latest addition to its widely adopted RivieraWaves Wi-Fi IP family - the RivieraWaves Wi-Fi 6 AP IP. The new IP addresses the expansion of Wi-Fi 6 into the smart home, industrial, automotive and IoT markets, and meets the huge demand for high bit rate, low latency connectivity in emerging consumer and enterprise applications. This IP leverages all the latest advanced features of the IEEE 802.11ax standard to deliver a premium Wi-Fi user experience in today's device-dense homes/offices/factories.

Wi-Fi 6 is at the peak of mass adoption around the world and is expected to replace Wi-Fi 5 (IEEE 802.11ac) as the dominant standard in consumer Wi-Fi in 2023. According to market research firm ABI Research, more than 1 billion consumer, enterprise, and operator Wi-Fi APs will be shipped between 2022 and 2026, with the vast majority of them adopting the Wi-Fi 6/6E standard.

Modern home and office environments are filled with countless high-bandwidth clients, such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, game consoles, smart TVs and set-top boxes, as well as a growing number of IoT devices (including smart appliances, lights, plugs, thermostats, video doorbells, etc.). In addition, Industry 4.0 use cases such as manufacturing and factory automation require cost-effective, low-latency, high-performance indoor connections in challenging environments. The native innovative features of Wi-Fi 6 make it ideal for such heterogeneous ultra-high concurrency environments. Advanced features (multi-user OFDMA downlink, uplink, and multi-user MIMO, etc.) provide amazing performance, efficiency, and low latency. Moreover, using the new 6GHz spectrum resources opened by Wi-Fi 6E, ultra-high throughput of 160MHz bandwidth connections can be achieved even in crowded environments.

The RivieraWaves Wi-Fi 6 AP IP is available in a 2x2 configuration and provides a complete digital PHY and MAC layer solution for IEEE 802.11ax applications, supporting up to 160MHz bandwidth and up to 2401Mbps throughput (at MCS11-2SS-160MHz). It supports AES-CCM /GCMP, RC4 and WPI cryptographic accelerators, as well as key features for enhanced transmission use, such as preamble puncturing, target wake-up time (TWT), fragmentation and 1024 QAM. Advanced PTA functionality ensures smooth coexistence with Bluetooth technology. The flexible radio interface unit can integrate RF from multiple CEVA partners and licensees' own RF, including 6GHz RF to support Wi-Fi 6E. To simplify SoC/ASSP design deployment, the RivieraWaves Wi-Fi 6 AP IP offers an integration with an optional open source RISC-V processor, and the platform can also be based on a non-specific operating system.

Tal Shalev, vice president and general manager of the Wireless IoT Business Unit at CEVA, commented: "Our RivieraWaves Wi-Fi 6 AP IP lowers the barriers and reduces time to market for developing Wi-Fi 6/6E AP SoCs to capitalize on the huge growth opportunity for high-performance APs in home, office, enterprise and industrial environments. We are seeing strong demand for this latest IP from semiconductor companies and OEMs and have already signed multiple licensees. We look forward to seeing CEVA-powered Wi-Fi 6/6E AP products entering the market soon."

Availability

CEVA's RivieraWaves Wi-Fi 6 AP IP is available for licensing now.