Qualcomm Introduces Wi-Fi Chips for 802.11ax

Qualcomm has presented two chips that are suitable for use with the 802.11ax standard for Wi-Fi. One is suitable for routers while the other is for client devices.

Respectively, it concerns the IPQ8074 soc and the QCA6290 chipset, according to Qualcomm. The first soc uses a 12×12 configuration and deploys mu-mimo for both downloads and uploads. The 12×12 configuration stems from 8×8 on 5GHz and 4×4 on 2.4GHz. The 14nm chip is equipped with a quad-core Cortex A53-64bit processor and should provide faster connections of up to 4.8Gbit/s over a larger surface.

The QCA6290 is a 28nm one, has support for 2×2-mu-mimo and offers speeds of up to 1.8Gbit/s. This variant is built to reduce the energy consumption of devices. 802.11ax brings some improvements over its predecessor 802.11ac, according to Qualcomm, which is supported by many devices today.

802.11ax should ensure that network capacity is better utilized now that the frequency space of Wi-Fi networks is often used to set up a large number of wireless networks next to each other. For example, to achieve this, the ax variant supports mu-mimo for uploads, while 802.11ac only applies that for downloads. The speed difference between the two generations can be up to a factor of four. In addition, 802.11ax uses the 4g technology ofdma, which should lead to greater efficiency for more than one user.

Qualcomm expects routers based on the IPQ8074 soc to appear this year. The American manufacturer expects to see devices that use the QCA6290 chipset in 2018.