The new year has finally arrived, and we’re getting a load of awesome tech to go along with it. As such, MediaTek has announced several new technologies ahead of the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES) 2023 in Las Vegas, and they bring some promising new advancements for Wi-Fi and smart home technology. Let’s take a look!
Genio 700 Platform
To kick things off, the company announced its latest addition to its Genio platform for IoT devices, which aims to bring improvements to smart home and smart retail tech, to name a couple. In particular, the series’ MediaTek Genio 700 is an octa-core chipset designed for just this purpose, featuring two ARM A78 cores running at 2.2GHz and six ARM A55 cores at 2.0GHz while providing 4.0 TOPs AI accelerator. It also comes with support for FHD60+4K60 display, as well as an ISP for better images. According to Richard Lu, Vice President of MediaTek IoT Business Unit:
“When we launched the Genio family of IoT products last year, we designed the platform with the scalability and development support that brands need, paving the way for opportunities to continue expanding. With a focus on industrial and smart home products, the Genio 700 is a perfect natural addition to the lineup to ensure we can provide the widest range of support possible to our customers.”
The Genio 700 SDK will allow designers to customize products using Yocto Linux, Ubuntu, and Android. With this support, customers can easily develop their own products with a minimal amount of effort, regardless of application type. Additionally, the chipset will have support for high-speed interfaces, including PCIe 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen1 and MIPI-CSI interface for cameras, Dual-Display support including FHD60+4K60 with AV1, VP9, H.265 and H.264 (video decode) support, industrial grade design and wide temp with 10 years longevity, ARM SystemReady certification for providing a standard and easy way to integrate the platform, as well as ARM PSA certification for increased security.
The Genio 700 will be commercially available in Q2 2023.
Wi-Fi 7 Ecosystem
MediaTek also unveiled its new Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem, making it one of the first adopters of the fastest Wi-Fi tech available right now. The company says that this new breakthrough is the result of investing into Wi-Fi 7 technology, aimed at improving always-on connected user experiences for use across smart devices, streaming products, residential gateways, and more.
As per Alan Hsu, MediaTek’s corporate vice president and general manager of the Intelligent Connectivity Business unit:
“Last year, we gave the world’s first Wi-Fi 7 technology demonstration, and we are honored to now show the significant progress we have made in building a more complete ecosystem of products. This lineup of devices, many of which are powered by the CES 2023 Innovation Award-winning Filogic 880 flagship chipset, illustrates our commitment to providing the best wireless connectivity.”
To put it simply, Wi-Fi 7 uses r320MHz channel bandwidth and 4096-QAM modulation to improve overall speeds and user experience. Multi-Link Operation (MLO) also enables Wi-Fi connections to aggregate channel speeds and greatly reduce link interruption in congested environments.
MediaTek’s Wi-Fi 7 solution uses a 6nm process, which reduces power consumption by 50%, a 25x reduction in CPU utilization, and 100x lower MLO switch latency. 4T5R and penta-band mesh are also included to address a larger area of coverage and higher number of linked devices.
The company also demoed several devices which use its latest Filogic chips, combining Wi-Fi 7 access point technology to broadband operators, retail router channels and enterprise markets. In particular, MediaTek’s Filogic 380 chipset is designed to bring Wi-Fi 7 connectivity to all client devices, including TVs, smart devices, and computers.
With that said, MediaTek’s push to innovate and integrate Wi-Fi 7 technology was met with much praise, particularly from its partners including AMD, Lenovo, ASUS, TP-Link, BUFFALO LINK, Korea Telecom, Hisense, Skyworks, Qorvo, Litepoint, and NI.
MediaTek x Federated Wireless
Additionally, MediaTek has also been working with Federated Wireless in successfully completing interoperability testing for Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) on MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6E chips.
For those unfamiliar with the term, AFC systems allow for standard power operation for indoor and outdoor unlicensed devices, including 5G CPEs, fiber gateways, and ethernet gateways, to transmit over 850 MHz of spectrum in the 6 GHz frequency band. This improves range for Wi-Fi products, as well as faster connectivity speeds and improved capacity, which comes into play alongside the arrival of Wi-Fi 7 technology. According to Alan Hsu, MediaTek’s corporate vice president of Connectivity:
“Our leadership in Wi-Fi technology would not be complete without ensuring our customers have easy access to AFC solutions. We are very happy to partner with Federated Wireless and to have finished an extensive series of integration testing. Our Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and 6E chips, including the CES 2023 Innovation Award-winning Filogic 880, will soon support Standard Power operation in the 6GHz spectrum for companies producing Wi-Fi devices.”
The aforementioned AFC interoperability testing consisted of a set of positive and negative tests drawn from the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA) AFC System certification specification. The positive tests included verifying the proper AFC calculation and response of spectrum availability at several locations, while the negative tests included verifying proper AFC System error handling. Kurt Schaubach, chief technology officer at Federated Wireless states:
“We are proud to partner with MediaTek to perform these critical interoperability tests to ensure that the commercial industry is ready for standard power device operations to begin. Federated Wireless prides itself on being a premier collaborator with our partners and customers interested in spectrum sharing solutions.”
The completion of these tests will allow customers to use Federated Wireless’ AFC system on MediaTek Filogic Wi-Fi 7 and 6E chips (upon full approval by the FCC).
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