Ceva-Waves 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) 1x1 20MHz STA Low Power MAC & modem

Overview

The Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi IP family offers a comprehensive suite of IPs and platforms for embedding Wi-Fi connectivity into SoCs/ASSPs addressing a broad range of applications.

This Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax IP is part of the Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi Low Power category, targeted at IoT peripherals, including wearables, medical devices, wireless audio and other use cases where power and cost are critical factors. This is the industry’s smallest footprint and lowest power Wi-Fi IP compliant with 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) 1x1 20MHz and 20/40MHz STAs.

The Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 Low Power IP consists of 802.11ax MAC and modem cores, restricted to 1x1 SISO with 20MHz or 20/40MHz bandwidths configurations, supporting STA and Soft AP modes. The MAC is controlled by a LMAC+UMAC (aka FullMAC) software protocol stack. The IP is provided with an integration-ready processor and operating-system- agnostic platform, simplifying deployment in SoC/ASSP designs. The Wi-Fi software protocol stack can be executed on any processor such as ARM, ARC, Andes, Cortus, RISC-V and others.

The Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 platform can be used in a standalone single processor chip or integrated into a bigger microcontroller with an application processor.

For more comprehensive solution, the Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 IP is well complemented with Ceva-DSP such as the Ceva-BX1/2, to execute audio processing or other always on sensor hub.

Silicon independent, the Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 Low Power IP supports several radio IPs from various partners such as Sirius Wireless. Other RF can be easily supported on customer demand.

Key Features

802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) MAC:

The Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 Low Power MAC core implements the IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ax standard supporting data rates of up to 114Mbps (20MHz bandwidth) or 229Mbps (40MHz bandwidth). It also supports the 802.11e standard (QoS) and the 802.11i standard (Security) extensions.
Ceva's profound expertise in wireless communications resulted in the highly optimized MAC core with special focus on low memory and MIPS requirements while maintaining a small gate count. The MAC core interfaces to the ARM standard AMBA bus.

802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) Modem:

The Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 Low Power hardwired modem core is optimized for use with the Ceva-Waves Wi-Fi 6 MAC IP to form a low power and cost effective 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) 20MHz or 20/40MHz STA solution. The supported features are:

Modulation Coding Schemes (MCS) from 0 to 9
20MHz or 20/40MHz bandwidths
Full implementation of OFDM & OFDMA processing up to the radio interface:

Scrambling
FEC coding, Viterbi & LDPC encoding/decoding
Interleaving
FFT
Timing, phase and frequency synchronization
Channel estimation & compensation
Reference digital front end with filtering, radio controller and software defined AGC/CCA state machine for highest flexibility

Benefits

low MIPS requirement
high performance
scalable

Block Diagram

Applications

Power sensitive IoT applications such as wearable, smartwatch, digital camera, smart home & industrial wireless sensors, entry market smart phones and tablets.

Deliverables

hardware: verilog RTL, testbench, compilation, simulation and synthesis scripts
software: C
documents
test tool running on Windows

Technical Specifications

Foundry, Node

any

Maturity

In Production

Availability

Available

TSMC

Pre-Silicon: 40nm LP

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