According to Taiwan’s Electronics Times, the IC packaging supply chain industry confessed that international WiFi SoC makers are actively brewing Wi-Fi 7 products, and high-end mobile phones supporting Wi-Fi 7 standards are expected to be available in the second half of 2024 at the earliest, but before that, routers will be the first to be upgraded, followed by NB products.
In May, Qualcomm said that Wi-Fi 7 chips were already shipping to customers and that end products were expected to be available by the end of this year, with significant shipments due in 2023. Wi-Fi 7 penetration is expected to reach 10% by 2023-2024.
MediaTek has also launched its first Wi-Fi 7 chips on a 6nm process, offering a comprehensive platform that “combines Wi-Fi 7 with powerful APs and NPUs to support maximum Wi-Fi, Ethernet and packet processing performance”.
Intel has also previously demonstrated Wi-Fi 7 at speeds in excess of 5Gbps across vendors, based on Core laptops + Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access points.
Wi-Fi 7 delivers higher speeds, lower latency, higher reliability and greater capacity, including the use of 320MHz channel bandwidth in unlicensed 6GHz spectrum (double the speed), 4K QAM orthogonal amplitude modulation (20% faster), multi-link operation MLO (improved throughput, link robustness, roaming, interference mitigation and reduced latency), as well as the ability to provide more efficient and reliable service through multiple resource unit (MRU) and perforation to improve channel utilization.
The Wi-Fi 7 standard has not yet been finalized and its product solutions are only half-baked solutions based on the features defined in the IEEE P802.11be draft amendment. Intel reportedly plans to launch Wi-Fi 7-certified products according to the Wi-Fi Alliance certification timeline (2023-2024 timeframe).
