Broadcom's Next-Gen WiFi Chip Plans: CES 2015

Broadcom announced its next generation of WiFi chips for high-performance routers, gateways, and set-top boxes. The new SoCs uses 4x4 multiple user-multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) for additional capacity and lower power consumption.

"We believe this will provide home users a lot better performance, especially home users that have a lot of different devices or WiFi client devices to experience better performance of their networks," Manny Patel, director of wireless connectivity for Broadcom, told EE Times.

Broadcom's BCM4366 for gateways and set-top boxes incorporates multiple 802.11ac Wave 2 features, including radio optimization for high-quality video over a wireless network. The chip can be combined with an updated network processor SoC -- based on a 1.4-GHz dual-core ARM-A9 -- for access point routers. When enabling four devices, the chip has an aggregate throughput of 1,733 Mbytes/second.

The BCM4366 has a maximum speed of 2.2 Gigabytes/second with a dedicated digital signal processor for MU-MIMO processing. Broadcom's first generation of WiFi chips didn't use a dedicated DSP.

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