Broadcom Inc. today debuted three new Wi-Fi 7 chips that can be used to equip routers and handsets with wireless networking capabilities. 

Wi-Fi 7 is the latest version of the eponymous wireless networking technology. It can provide up to 46 gigabits per second of bandwidth, twice the maximum amount that was supported before. The technology also promises to lower connection latency significantly. 

“With the addition of these three new products, Broadcom enables its customers to build a diverse set of high-performance Wi-Fi 7 products across a wide range of markets,” said Vijay Nagarajan, vice president of marketing at Broadcom’s wireless communications and connectivity division. 

The first two Wi-Fi 7 chips that Broadcom debuted today, the BCM6765 and BCM47722, are both designed for use in networking equipment. The former chip is optimized to power home routers. The BCM47722, in turn, is geared toward access points, the networking devices that enterprises use to provide Wi-Fi connectivity at their offices.

The two chips have similar designs. Both feature a quad-core central processing unit based on Arm Ltd.’s namesake processor architecture. Additionally, the BCM6765 and BCM47722 each include two built-in radios for sending data over wireless connections. 

According to Broadcom, the chips also include a number of supporting components. Those components are designed to improve the reliability of users’ Wi-Fi connections. 

Wireless signals weaken as they travel within a router’s circuitry or over the air to a user’s handset. As a result, the signals often have to be boosted before they can be processed. Broadcom’s new chips include built-in power amplifiers that strengthen incoming data transmissions to ease processing.

When a Wi-Fi signal passes through a component such as a power amplifier, its quality sometimes decreases, which can lead to networking issues. Routers use a technique called digital pre-distortion to mitigate such errors. Broadcom’s new Wi-Fi 7 chips can relegate the task of performing digital pre-distortion to external components called front-end modules, an arrangement the company says reduces power consumption.

The set of radio frequencies over which a handset sends data to a Wi-Fi router is known as a channel. The speed at which data can be transmitted is measured using a metric called channel width. Wi-Fi 7 offers twice the channel width of the previous-generation Wi-Fi 6E technology, or 320 MHz, which is one of the reasons it’s faster. 

Broadcom says its BCM6765 and BCM47722 chips both support 320 MHz Wi-Fi connections. They also support Multi-Link Operation, another enhancement introduced with Wi-Fi 7. The technology allows a device to transit data over multiple channels, or frequency collections, rather than over only one channel as was the practice before, which speeds up connections.

Broadcom’s two new chips share many of their core features, but not all of them. The BCM47722, the chip built to power enterprise-grade Wi-Fi access points, provides several capabilities not included in the consumer-focused BCM6765. 

The enterprise-focused BCM47722 supports not only Wi-Fi 7 but also a number of other networking protocols including Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread and Zigbee. Like Wi-Fi 7, the three protocols enable devices to transmit data wirelessly. But they use significantly less electricity, which makes them more suitable for low-power connected devices such as industrial sensors.

Broadcom says the BCM47722 is also forward-compatible with an upcoming technology called Bluetooth Channel Sounding. A part of the Bluetooth wireless protocol, the latter technology will make it possible to determine the location of connected devices with a high degree of precision. It’s designed for use cases such as tracking the position of warehouse robots at fulfillment centers. 

The third chip that Broadcom debuted today is referred to as the BCM4390. It’s designed not to power routers, but rather for use in smartphones and tablets. Handset makers can use the chip to add Wi-Fi 7 support to their devices.

According to Broadcom, the BCM4390 also supports the Zigbee and Threat low-power wireless networking technologies. Furthermore, it’s compatible with two versions of the Bluetooth wireless protocol. The chip supports both the standard version of the technology as well as Bluetooth Low-Energy, a more power-efficient implementation optimized for tasks such as syncing data between a user’s handset and smartwatch. 

Image: Broadcom