Wi-Fi 6E tri-band SoC to support 6GHz band

NXP Semiconductors lays the foundation for a new era of Wi-Fi 6 devices that can function in the 6GHz band with its new CW641 Wi-Fi 6E Tri-Band SoC. With growing congestion in the legacy 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, the US FCC has approved 1.2GHz of unlicensed spectrum for the 6GHz band with other regions worldwide, which will transform the Wi-Fi landscape. The company is launching a Wi-Fi 6E device that will work with this 6GHz band and extend Wi-Fi capacity by producing higher throughout, improved capacity, reliability, and enhanced latency.

The company's new SoC makes it feasible to take full advantage of the transformative 6GHz spectrum to increase the performance of in-home mesh networks, streaming high-resolution music and videos, video calling, digital downloads, online gaming, data-heavy web content, and many other use cases. Beyond access point applications, the SoC sets the stage for high-performance Wi-Fi 6E applications across consumer, automotive, industrial, and IoT.

“NXP’s Wi-Fi 6E chipset combines multi-gigabyte data rates, low latency, and higher multi-user performance to deliver on customer demands for 6GHz products that address the decade-long need for the greater capacity required in today’s wireless networking applications,” said Larry Olivas, head of marketing for NXP’s Wireless Connectivity Solutions. “As our first Wi-Fi 6E SoC to support the 6GHz spectrum, the CW641 enhances the overall Wi-Fi experience by making less congested airwaves available to routers and gateways for multi-device, data-intensive applications. Our new chipset makes it possible to take advantage of this new uncongested bandwidth, which will provide increased performance with less interference for devices on the Wi-Fi 6E network.”

“The increased availability of unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi is the most exciting and transformative change to the Wi-Fi landscape in recent times, bringing about much higher throughput, greater capacity, increased reliability, and improved quality of service, all of which will help enable new wireless services while addressing key challenges currently facing the technology,” said Andrew Zignani, principal analyst at ABI Research. “However, in order to realise this potential, the Wi-Fi industry requires new Wi-Fi 6E chipsets that can effectively address the varied demands of the market. Solutions such as NXP’s latest CW641 Wi-Fi 6E chipset will play a fundamental role in enabling the 6 GHz infrastructure rollout, allowing a varied ecosystem of end devices, applications and services to take advantage of this enormous new opportunity for Wi-Fi.”