The recent release of Synaptics’ Wi-Fi 7 system-on-chips (SoCs) reflected how the company is investing in the Wi-Fi 7 market as it experiences steady growth and is beginning to enter into IoT applications. This was according to Vineet Ganju, Vice President Wireless Connectivity Products at Synaptics, who spoke to IoT Insider in an exclusive briefing.
The new SoCs are the SYN4390 and SYN4384, expanding Synaptics’ Veros wireless portfolio targeted at IoT applications. Both support bandwidths up to 320MHz with 5.8Gbps speed and low latency.
In order to understand the need for the new Wi-Fi SoCs, Ganju first painted a picture of the Wi-Fi 7 market, which he said – similar to other new and emerging technologies – was first adopted in smartphones and access points, before entering into the high-performance IoT market.
Currently shipments of smartphones supporting Wi-Fi 7 are at 7% this year, where they were 1% in 2023. Meanwhile, shipments of router and access points have grown from 1% to 12%.
“Adoption in phones and routers … generally speaking … is where you see new Wi-Fi standards adopted first, because everything in the IoT market depends on access points and smartphones having the technology,” explained Ganju.
Synaptic’s focus is on the high-performance IoT market which makes it the “right time” to launch a portfolio of Wi-Fi 7 products. Ganju defined high-performance IoT as applications such as 8K video streaming, VR and AR headsets, which require low latency and high-quality video and audio.
What’s new about Wi-Fi 7
What’s new about Wi-Fi 7? Notably, speed and bandwidth have been improved, with theoretical speeds 4X faster than Wi-Fi 6.
“What are the key things that product manufacturers look for or care about,” said Ganju, “one is … peak speed or throughput performance. From a technology point of view, Wi-Fi 7 introduces a new modulation technology, higher max channel bandwidth and a max PHY rate.”
A new, important feature of Wi-Fi 7 is its multi-link operation (MLO), which enables the transmission of data across different bands – be that 2.4GHz, 5GHz or even 6GHz, depending on where you are in the world.
This addresses a common issue users can experience when multiple devices on a network are transmitting and receiving data simultaneously on the same band. If a band becomes crowded, there’s more interference and the product transmitting has to lower its transmission to cope. This results in lower throughput or higher latency, and, in some cases, the connection is cut by the access point and a new connection is created.
“Multi-link operation … allows you to send and receive data in 2.4GHz and 5GHz simultaneously,” said Ganju. “So you can be sending most of your data in 2.4GHz and as it becomes crowded or [there is] higher interference, you can seamlessly switch the data to the 5GHz band and take advantage of less interference in that band.”
Another feature of note is its capability to support more streams in the same bandwidth with higher density, which is beneficial for environments such as offices and stadiums, which are going to have multiple connected devices in one place.
Three key areas
In developing its Wi-Fi 7 products, Ganju noted three key areas Synaptics focused on: firstly, creating a portfolio of both cost-effective and high-performance solutions so there was something for everyone; making its Wi-Fi 7 technology power-efficient, particularly important given MLO can consume a lot of power and IoT applications are frequently battery-powered; and making its chip capable of supporting multiple protocols including Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread and Matter.
The SYN4390 is designed for products “that want the maximum possible performance,” while the SYN4384 is optimised for embedded IoT, on the lower end of applications that need cost-effectiveness and efficient power consumption as key capabilities. This cost-effectiveness is what sets Synaptics apart from other Wi-Fi 7 chips on the market, Ganju explained.
“One of the key things that we see … enabling this … embedded IoT market is having more power efficient, cost efficient, Wi-Fi 7 implementation,” he said.
Having three radios for each band and operating across these bands simultaneously – MLO – tends to result in high power consumption.
“What we’ve done is we’ve implemented our radio architecture in a way that very intelligently … switches radios between these bands so that we’re not tripling the power required to do this multi-link operation,” said Ganju. “That way we achieve the benefits of MLO, but without the cost and power associated with doing that.”
By integrating these protocols into one chip, device manufacturers making anything from smartphones to smart home hubs have ease of integration. The growth in adoption of Thread and Zigbee for smart home devices means being able to switch between protocols is going to become more important.
Looking ahead
A chip achieving a maximum performance of 320MHz will be launched later this year, although when that will be and the name of the chip, wasn’t disclosed in the briefing.
However, the reason the company hasn’t launched a chip serving this bandwidth yet was strategic, as Ganju revealed: “It’s practically not very useful because of a number of reasons. The main one is that you can only achieve this throughput in very low range, low distance … unless you’re standing with your phone just a metre away from your access point, you won’t be able to achieve those peak speeds.”
Its mindset of always looking to adopt next-gen technology to stay on the cutting edge was how Ganju characterised the company’s strategic approach.
“We’re just launching Wi-Fi 7 now. But you can imagine … when we needed to start development to be able to launch these chips.”
The SYN4390 has already been adopted in a smartphone – more specifically the Google Pixel 9 – marking the first wave of adoption of Synaptics’ Wi-Fi 7 SoCs, with the expectation that high-performance IoT products using its chipsets will launch on the market at the middle of next year.
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