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MediaTek was the last of the three major vendors to announce its WiFi 7 chip lineup. Qualcomm announced its WiFi 7 Networking Pro series in early May, while Broadcom has four WiFi 7 products in its ecosystem, which were announced back in April.
While WiFI 7 is still in development, and the final version isn’t expected to be released until 2024, I expect we might start seeing some consumer hardware in 2023. There’s a good chance the next-gen flagship mobile chipset will be the first to feature WiFi 7, but that’s probably an overly optimistic guess.
Five-band grid and MLO
Two interesting features in the introduction include panta-band support and MLO.
Multilink operation is one of WiFi 7’s standout features. This allows individual frequency bands to be combined to increase throughput.
New for me is the penta-band support. With WiFi 5, you can use a tri-band with a single 5Ghz band for backhaul.Then Wireless 6E Brings quad-band, giving you three separate bands on the client and a dedicated 5Ghz band between the access points.
Thanks to MLO, you can now have a fifth band, allowing both 5Ghz and 6Ghz bands for backhaul. This will maximize throughput while avoiding the range issues you face when trying to use only 6Ghz for backhaul.
For a 4×4 radio using MLO, you would theoretically get 19Gbps fronthaul and 17Gbps backhaul.
MediaTek Filogic 880 Features
- Supports key WiFi 7 technologies such as 4096-QAM, 320MHz, MRU and MLO
- Flexibility to scale up to 36Gbps speeds in five bands
- Single channel supports up to 10Gbps
- Supports OFDMA RU, MU-MIMO and MBSSID
In addition to WiFi 7 capabilities, the Filic 880 platform offers a powerful host processor, including a quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 applications processor and advanced NPU. Key features include:
- Advanced network offload engine supporting data rates up to 20Gbps
- Built-in network encryption engine (EIP-197) for accelerating IPSec, SSL/TLS, DTLS (CAPWAP), SRTP and MACsec
- Supports high-speed interfaces (5Gbps USB and 10Gbps PCI-Express), UART, SD, SPI, PWM, GPIO, and OTP, providing rich platform customization opportunities
MediaTek Filogic 380 Features
The Filic 380 is a standalone single-chip 6nm WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 combo solution designed to deliver best-in-class connectivity. It is optimized for smartphones, TVs, laptops, set-top boxes, OTT streaming devices and many other consumer electronics devices powered by MediaTek SoCs.
Key features of the Filic 380 include:
- Supports key WiFi 7 technologies such as 4096-QAM, 320MHz, MRU and MLO
- Supports MLO for speeds up to 6.5Gbps
- Single lane supports up to 5Gbps
- Supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz frequency bands
- Supports dual 2×2 radios for dual-band simultaneous operation
- Latest Bluetooth 5.3 with LE Audio
