It’s almost a daily occurrence at the moment ‘ yet another candidate to transmit HD video rapidly and wirelessly around our homes in future. In the build-up to January’s Consumer Electronics Show, we have seen two would-be standards (WHDI and WiGig) publishing their specifications, and a new start-up, ProVision, entering the fray. Now it’s the turn of Quantenna, one of the most high profile of the companies using souped-up Wi-Fi/MIMO combinations to address the challenge. But all eyes should really be on Qualcomm, which is taking a similar approach using technology it acquired with Airgo, and should release its chips in the coming few months.
Quantenna has unveiled a complete reference design based on its QHS600 chipset, which supports 802.11n fast Wi-Fi and 4×4 MIMO smart antenna arrays. The QHS600 was first announced in October 2008 and now the vendor is looking to attract interest by providing a reference platform to speed time to market. It offers a single-chip solution running in the 5GHz band (nearly all in-home video platforms use either a variant of 5GHz Wi-Fi, or operate in the more experimental 60GHz). It claims speeds of 600Mbps and the chipset integrates the baseband, MAC and four RF transceivers, along with their power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers and Tx/Rx switches.
The real differentiator is the approach to beamforming, according to Quantenna. Its CEO David French told EETimes: “Of more value is the digital beamforming hardware with on-chip digital signal processing, doing real time characterization of the Wi-Fi channel to perform signal steering on a packet-by-packet basis.” He claims 14 patents around the DSP mechanisms (using an ARC 4 processor) and says other performance boosters include a concurrent dual-band mode and mesh networking capabilities. The chip should fall below the $10 price mark within a year.
In the commercial world, Quantenna’s first deal is with Swisscom, which is also an investor, and it claims a further eight, unnamed operator customers. It aims to use its reference platform with associated software developers kit to extend the ecosystem and attract more attention from service providers, which in turn should catch the eye of the all-important consumer electronics majors. Many of these, including Sony and Samsung, are currently showing interest in the WirelessHD initiative in 60GHz, and the emerging WiGig ultra-fast Wi-Fi effort.