MaxLinear has unveiled its first Wi-Fi 7 SoCs with the MxL31712 and the MxL31708 single-chip solutions targeting service provider gateways, Wi-Fi routers, and access points, and delivering more than 70% higher tri-band throughput compared to Wi-Fi 6.
The MxL31712 aims at the premium 4×4 tri-band market with a throughput of up to 18.6 Gbps and up to 12 spatial streams, while the MxL31708 will be integrated into mid- to high-range 4×4 dual-band access points and gateways with a throughput of up to 17 Gbps, and up to 8 spatial streams.
MaxLinear MxL31712 and MxL31708 share the following features:
- Single-chip WFA Wi-Fi 7 R1 certifiable
- Based on IEEE 802.11be (aka WiFi 7 or Extremely High Throughput “EHT”) backward compliant to IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6
- Wi-Fi 7 features:
- Bandwidth up to 320MHz
- 4096 QAM modulation
- Multi-Link Operation (MLO)
- Multi Resource Unit (MRU)
- Dedicated antenna for Zero Wait DFS (ZWDFS)
- Enhanced Network Efficiency
- Digital Pre-Distortion (DPD)
- Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC) support
- Fully offloaded Wi-Fi traffic
- Coexistence support for PAN radios
- Host Interface – PCIe Gen4
Both chips are optimized to interface with MaxLinear’s AnyWAN URX broadband SoCs and will be found in gateways with cable, fiber, copper, Ethernet, 2-Box (CNXSoft: not sure what this is…), and/or 5G FWA connectivity, as well as Wi-Fi 7 routers, access points, extenders, repeaters, and mesh networking solutions.
Since the WiFi 7 chips are coprocessors there’s no information about software support, but we previously reported that MaxLinear’s AnyWAN URX SoC could run the Yocto-based prplOS (formerly known as prplWRT), RDK-B, or MaxLinear’s UGW (Universal Gateway Software) based on OpenWrt.
MaxLinear MxL31712 and MxL31708 Wi-Fi 7 chips are at the pre-production stage with some samples available to selected partners, and mass production is scheduled to start next year. More details can be found on the respective product pages and the press release.
Thanks to TLS for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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I’m still confused about what this actually is. They call it a SoC, but from the description it sounds like PCIe wifi chip that can act as an AP. Does it run Linux (or another full-featured OS) in a way that would make it a SoC?
I can see that the older Wi-fi-6 chips from Maxlinear (Intel WAV600) are also called SoCs, but not the Wi-fi-5 generation (WAV500). prplos comes with a driver for these at
https://gitlab.com/prpl-foundation/intel/iwlwav-dev/-/tree/ugw-8.5.2/drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwav but that has been dormant for a year and doesn’t contain any reference to the new chips. The WAV600 driver code suggests that this was based on the Lantiq product line, rather than related to Intel’s own iwlwifi driver.
Uhm no open drivers no party. For wat I’ve herad in Openwrt IRC maxlinear is not that friendly as Lantiq was.
MaxLinear is bumping the news before CES 2024, so I suppose that means mass production for the MaxLinear MxL31712 and MxL31708 Wi-Fi 7 chips may have been delayed and they will only be launched this year?