CEVA announces industry’s first 802.11ax WiFi IPs

CEVA, the leading licensor of signal processing platforms and artificial intelligence processors for smarter, connected devices, today unveiled its new RivieraWaves RW-AX family of 802.11ax WiFi Intellectual Property (IP), targeting client devices, the smart home and network infrastructure.

Building on its market leadership in WiFi IP, CEVA is the first company to offer licensable 802.11ax solutions, providing its customers with a comprehensive platform to integrate the latest WiFi standard into their next-gen product designs.

“We are already seeing a growing demand for 802.11ax, for both high performance access points and low power IoT applications,” said Aviv Malinovitch, vice president and general manager of the connectivity business unit at CEVA. “We are proud to offer our customers the most efficient 802.11ax IP solutions, extending the low power and high performance RivieraWaves WiFi family.”

With the proliferation of smart phones, over-the-top boxes and smart home devices which rely on WiFi, the WiFi spectrum has become increasingly congested. This leads to below-par service and reduced bandwidth for users, particularly in dense environments. WiFi 802.11ax not only provides 25% data rate improvements over 802.11ac but also much needed innovations to aid spectrum efficiency and network capacity. These include the use of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for bandwidth sharing and uplink Multi-User MIMO capabilities for more symmetrical data loads.

Moreover, with the addition of other new features such as wake-time scheduling, this latest generation of WiFi also addresses the needs of IoT and low power devices, offering greater efficiency and lower power consumption. As a result, 802.11ax in a slim 1×1 configuration is an ideal future-proofing replacement for 802.11n in ultra-low power IoT devices.

The new RivieraWaves RW-AX family includes:

• RW-AX Low Power: This 11ax 20MHz platform is ideal for small, low power IoT devices, including wearables.
• RW-AX High Performance: The 802.11ax 1×1 and 2×2 platforms with symmetrical Multi-User MIMO are tailored for high performance applications such as smartphones, tablets, set top box and smart home access points.
• RW-AX Multi-Gig: Highest performance 802.11ax up to 4×4, addressing the most advanced use cases including access points, media gateways and WiFi offload in small cells.

Each RivieraWaves WiFi solution incorporates PHY modem functions and MAC functions, including Lower MAC (LMAC) and Full MAC software protocol stacks. The IP is provided with an integration-ready platform containing an optional open-source processor and is operating-system-agnostic, simplifying deployment in SoC/ASSP designs. RivieraWaves WiFi is widely deployed in consumer and IoT devices with many of the world’s leading semiconductors companies and OEMs, targeting a broad range of connected devices, including smartphones, tablets, wearables, consumer electronics, smart home, industrial and automotive applications.