Mediatek was one of the first vendors demonstration In January 2022, we will operate 802.11be compliant silicon under the Filogic lineup. As part of this week’s Computex announcement, the company provided additional technical details along with part numbers. The Filogic 880 platform serves access points, routers and gateways, and the Filogic 380 is visible on client devices.
Wi-Fi 7 / 802.11be background
The 802.11 Working Group focused on very high throughput when starting work on 802.11be. This was achieved primarily by a combination of three different aspects.
- Support for up to 16 spatial streams
- Supports channel widths up to 320 MHz (operating in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands)
- Support for 4096-QAM (4K-QAM) improves the utilization of available spectra (faster modulation / coding schemes).
It should be noted that the wider channel is only available in the 5GHz and 6GHz bands. Theoretically, these aspects allow a wireless throughput of up to about 46Gbps. 802.11be also aims to enable Wi-Fi in real-time applications by including low-latency communication features such as multi-link operation (MLO). This allows clients and access points to communicate simultaneously over multiple channels that may belong to different bands.
Source: Mediatek Wi-Fi 7 White paper
802.11ax introduced OFDMA to divide the channel into multiple resource units (RUs), allowing multiple clients to receive data packets at the same time. Wi-Fi 7 provides Multiple RU (MRU) functionality that allows for punctured RU (20 MHz particle size). Puncturing allows for reduced interference and also improves OFDMA efficiency.
Source: Mediatek Wi-Fi 7 White paper
The advantages of MRU are shown in the figure above. In addition, puncturing improves spectral efficiency and data bandwidth. Below that, you can see the obvious delay benefits when multiple clients are active at the same time.
Interference and coexistence with non-Wi-Fi users in the same spectrum is handled using Automatic Frequency Tuning (AFC). While Broadcom has promised to support the OpenAFC initiative and Qualcomm will offer its customers its own turnkey solution, Mediatek has only shown that the Filogic 880 platform will support AFC, with additional details. There is none.
Mediatek Filogic 880 platform
Mediatek Filogic 880 The platform will serve the Wi-Fi 7 access point and wireless router market. Like its competitors, the platform has all the major Wi-Fi 7 features (320 MHz bandwidth in 6 GHz band, 4K-QAM, multilink operation (MLO), automatic frequency adjustment (AFC), and multiple resources. Unit) is supported.
The platform supports up to 5 bands with an independent RF IC that communicates with the Filogic 680 Wi-Fi 7 baseband chip. Traditional routers can only use 3 bandwidths, while mesh systems and premium routers can take advantage of support for 2 additional bandwidths. At the heart of the reference design is a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex A73-based WiSoC. It also includes a network processing unit (NPU) with hardware-accelerated QoS and a tunneling offload engine. However, WiSoC does not include an integrated switch. The design is expected to employ an external switch to convert one of the two 10Gbps USXGMII ports to a single 10GbE, or a combination of NBASE-T ports and Gigabit Ethernet ports. A variety of other high speed I / O are also available in WiSoC.
Unlike Qualcomm (the announcement of the Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro product suite was featured earlier this month), Mediatek takes an open approach in that it exposes the technical details of the platform to the public. Broadcom took a similar approach when deploying its product suite.
The Filogic 880 platform WiSoC is manufactured on a 6nm process. According to Mediatek, this provides significant power efficiency compared to competitors (it is difficult to evaluate this claim without general knowledge of the manufacturing process of Qualcomm and Broadcom products and the open house of the platform. is).
The MAC / baseband is implemented in the Filogic 680 part. Here, Mediatek chooses an interesting approach. The 6GHz band also employs a 4T5R (quad transmit, penta receive) antenna configuration to improve the backhaul throughput and range of the mesh system in particular. The Filogic 680 contains MAC and baseband logic for all three bands, as well as MLO control. Mediatek said this approach is superior to the discrete MAC / PHY scheme for each band between WiSoC and basebad / RFC, and by placing MLO logic in WiSoC, latency (claims up to 100x improvement). It claims to be excellent from the point of view of. As a board design cost.
Mediatek’s reference design is a 4-layer PCB, which should help customers reduce costs. Mediatek argues that the competitor’s multi-chip MAC / PHY / baseband approach brings higher costs for more complex PCBs (6-layer or 8-layer PCBs). These aspects should be immediately apparent to end users when routers / APs based on platforms from different vendors hit the market.
Mediatek Filogic 380
On the client side, Mediatek Filogic 380 A combo solution that supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3. This combo single chip solution is also built on a 6nm process. The 2×2 solution supports speeds up to 6.5 Gbps with dual band dual concurrent operation. 320 Mhz bandwidth, 4K-QAM, MLO, and MRU are supported.
Mediatek also showed support for additional receive antennas to improve the performance and range of Bluetooth 5.3 connections by enabling MRC (Multiple Receive Combined). Bluetooth LE audio is also supported. The Filogic 380 also includes coexistence technology that allows both BT and Wi-Fi to operate in the 2.4GHz band without interference. The host connection is made via either PCIe 4.0×1 or USB 3.0.
Mediatek is currently demonstrating both platforms on Compute x2022. According to Mediatek’s claim, routers and APs based on the Filogic 880 should reach a very attractive price without sacrificing any performance or functionality. Products based on the new Filogic platform should begin to hit the market within a few quarters.
