Broadcom Announces Five Wi-Fi 7 Chips for Routers, Enterprise and Mobile

Broadcom has announced its first five Wi-Fi 7 chips. The chips are available as a sample and serve as the foundation for routers, residential gateways, business access points, and also mobile solutions that want to take advantage of the recently announced successor to Wi-Fi 6E.

broadcom says that the Wi-Fi 7 chips achieve twice the speed of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. Wi-Fi 7 doubles the bandwidth by using 320MHz channels and 4096-QAM modulation. For now, the specification for Wi-Fi 7, or IEEE standard 802.11be, is still under development, but several manufacturers are already developing products based on the new generation of Wi-Fi. Qualcomm announced the first Wi-Fi 7 adapters in February. As with Wi-Fi 6E, there is support for 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz, with Wi-Fi 7 emphasizing the 6GHz band.

Broadcom’s five chips are intended for different markets. Broadcom has developed two chips for the consumer market, for Wi-Fi access points, routers and mesh networks. The BCM67263 supports four Wi-Fi 7 channels on the 6GHz band, with an 11.5Gbit/s PHY rate. The BCM6726 has a PHY rate of up to 5.75Gbit/s with support for 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz and 160MHz channel bandwidth.

The BCM43740 and BCM43720 are intended for the business market and various users, with faster speeds of up to 11.5Gbit/s for the BCM43740. The BCM4398 has been developed for mobile applications, especially smartphones. It supports two Wi-Fi 7 streams, 320MHz bandwidth and a PHY rate of 6.05Gbit/s. The chips are not yet being produced on a large scale, but can already be requested by hardware manufacturers as samples.