Maryland-based Ceva has extended its wifi portfolio with Wifi 6 and 6E IP for the access point market in smart homes and enterprises, as well as industrial, automotive and other IoT applications.

The licensor of wireless connectivity and smart sensing technologies and integrated IP has announced the latest member of its widely adopted RivieraWaves wifi IP family. It addresses the expansion of Wifi 6 into the smart home, industrial, automotive and IoT markets, and the growing need for high bit rate, low latency connectivity in emerging consumer and enterprise applications.

The access point IP leverages the latest features of the IEEE 802.11ax standard to improve the wifi user experience in today’s device-dense homes, offices and factories.

Wifi 6 is on the cusp of mass global adoption and is on track to displace Wifi 5 (IEEE 802.11ac) by 2023 as the dominant form of consumer wifi. ABI Research forecasts more than a billion consumer, enterprise and carrier wifi access points to ship between 2022 and 2026, the vast majority of which will be based on the Wifi 6 and 6E standards.

The modern home and office environment is a sea of high bandwidth clients such as phones, laptops, tablets, gaming stations, smart TVs and set-top boxes, plus an increasing army of IoT devices spanning smart appliances, lights, plugs, thermostats, video doorbells and more. In addition, Industry 4.0 use cases, such as manufacturing and factory automation, demand cost-effective, low-latency, high-performance indoor connectivity in difficult environments.

The innovations inherent in Wifi 6 make it suitable for such heterogeneous high concurrency environments. Features such as multi-user OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) downlink and uplink, as well as multi-user mimo, deliver improved performance, efficiency and low latency. Further, with the 6GHz spectrum resource opened by Wifi 6E, high throughput with 160HMz bandwidth connections is realistic even in congested environments.

The access point IP delivers a complete digital phy and mac layers bundle for IEEE 802.11ax in a 2×2 configuration, supporting up to 160MHz bandwidth. It supports a toolbox of AES-CCM, GCMP, RC4 and WPI crypto accelerators but also some features to enhance medium usage such as the preamble puncturing, target wake time, fragmentation and 1024 QAM.

A PTA function ensures smooth co-existence with Bluetooth. The flexible radio interface unit enables integration with radio circuitry from multiple Ceva partners or licensees’ own radios, including with radios that support 6GHz for Wifi 6E.

To simplify deployment in SoC and ASSP designs, the access point IP is provided with an integration-ready platform containing an optional open-source Risc-V processor and is operating-system-agnostic.

“Addressing the tremendous growth opportunities for high performance access points in the home, office, enterprise and industrial environments, our RivieraWaves Wifi 6 access point IP lowers the entry barriers and accelerates time-to-market for developing Wifi 6 and 6E access point SoCs,” said Tal Shalev, vice president at Ceva. “We are experiencing strong demand from semiconductors and OEMs for this latest IP, with multiple licensees already signed. We look forward to seeing Ceva-powered Wifi 6 and 6E access point products in the market in the near future.”

The IP is available for licensing now.