Broadcom Unveils 5G Wi-Fi Chips

Bangalore: Broadcom has introduced its first family of 802.11ac 5G Wi-Fi chips designed for broad range of products in Consumer Electronic Shows 2012 at Las Vegas. This new Broadcom’s IEEE 802.11ac chips are three time faster and up to six times more power efficient than 4G Wi-Fi chips.

Here 5G is not related to fifth generation but it is actually five gigabits Wi-Fi network speed. This is the next generation Wi-Fi standard which is required for faster mobile network. Broadcom’s 5G Wi-Fi chip improvise the wireless range and allows users to watch HD videos online. With increase in speed, the chip allows users to download web contents much faster and also allows quick synchronization of  large file sizes like videos with in a fraction of the time.

Broadcom’s 5G Wi-Fi chips are named as BCM4360, BCM4352 and BCM43516. All these 5G Wi-Fi chips supports 80 MHz channel bandwidth that is 2 times wider than 4G Wi-Fi and a higher modulation scheme that increases data transfer efficiency.

The BCM4360 uses the PCIe interface and reaches the speed up to 1.3 Gbps, BCM4352 and BCM43526 reaches up to 867 Mbps and BCM43516 reaches the speed up to 433 Mbps.

Redpine, TRENDnet and other chip makers has also introduced 802.11ac network chip at CES 2012. Quantenna was the first company in the world to release 802.11ac gigabit wireless chips for routers last year at CES.