Broadcom is rolling out a new chip for smartphones and tablets that offers 2x2 MIMO functionality. The company is hoping to capitalize on the growing trend in smartphones, which are starting to incorporate 2x2 MIMO for 802.11ac Wi-Fi services and away from early generation 1x1 MIMO configurations.
The two-stream BCM4354 offers double the throughput of single-stream MIMO versions. It supports an 867 Mbps PHY link rate and 80 MHz channel bandwidth.
The combo chip supports 5 GHz, which is the range where 802.11ac operates. It also supports the 2.4 GHz band for older versions of 802.11 as well as Bluetooth Low Energy 4.1
According to Rahul Patel, vice president of mobile wireless connectivity at Broadcom, the new chip, which is available now, also provides 25 percent longer battery life than competing solutions and improves wireless coverage by up to 30 percent compared to current deployments.
In addition, a version of the BCM4354 SoC supports the Rezence wireless power technology developed by the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP). All versions of the SoC feature a full software platform including support for Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android and Chrome operating systems in addition Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows.
Adoption of 802.11ac, which Broadcom delights in calling "5G WiFi," in a broad array of new devices is helping drive the overall wireless LAN market. Last month, Dell'Oro Group predicted that 802.11ac equipment will help boost wireless LAN market revenues past $12.3 billion in 2018.
In other Broadcom news, the company also rolled out an open network functions virtualization (NFV) platform, which the company said it intended to accelerate NFV adoption by allowing implementation of applications across multiple system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor solutions based upon diverse Instruction Set Architectures (ISA).
"Customers have been asking for an ISA-independent solution to migrate virtual functions across diverse platforms, something they didn't previously have," said Ron Jankov, Broadcom senior vice president and general manager, processors and wireless infrastructure.
A live virtual function state migration proof of concept (PoC) submitted by Broadcom and recently accepted by ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) demonstrates a Tieto implementation of an enhanced packet core (EPC) and migration of the VF state one ISA to a different ISA.
For more:
- see this Broadcom release and this release
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