“Earlier, Qorvo Senior Marketing Manager Jeff Lin participated in a technical seminar and gave a presentation on topics such as Qorvo’s view of smart home architecture, Matter protocol and how WiFi 6E will affect the smart home. In the speech, Jeff Lin also brought an introduction to Qorvo’s “One Pod Per Room” and BandBoost filters, telling how they can help the development of smart homes.
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Earlier, Qorvo Senior Marketing Manager Jeff Lin participated in a technical seminar and gave a presentation on topics such as Qorvo’s view of smart home architecture, Matter protocol and how WiFi 6E will affect the smart home. In the speech, Jeff Lin also brought an introduction to Qorvo’s “One Pod Per Room” and BandBoost filters, telling how they can help the development of smart homes.
Jeff Lin first said that for the IoT market, there are several short-range, short-range and long-range wireless technologies covering Bluetooth, UWB, Zigbee/Thread/Matter, WiFi and LTE/NB-IoT.
Jeff Lin further pointed out that in Qorvo’s view, the smart home will be built with the “WiFi Pod” architecture shown in the figure below. Specifically, there will be a node (AP) in each room, devices within the AP’s range will connect to it through protocols such as Zigbee, Bluetooth, and Matter, and then all nodes will be connected through a backbone network (such as WiFi) , and then form a seamless and interconnected smart home connection solution.
In the past, smart home products built by different companies were independent ecosystems, and they were also isolated islands of information, which made the smart home that should have been unsmart, and customers also had restrictions when choosing smart products. In order to solve this problem, the giants promoted the birth of the Matter standard.
According to reports, Matter is a connection standard for smart homes promoted by a number of giants including Apple, Amazon and Google. To be precise, this standard is an upgraded version of the previous “CHIP Alliance”. According to Matter’s definition and vision, all products that meet the needs of its protocol can be interconnected.
“As an important player in the smart home, Qorvo has not been absent from Matter. The company has not only joined this alliance, but also has some products certified for the Matter protocol, supporting customers to create products that support Matter.” Jeff Lin said.
As mentioned earlier, in Qorvo’s view, WiFi will play an important role in Pods in smart homes. In recent years, with the arrival of WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E, the speed of WiFi has been greatly improved, the bandwidth has also been expanded, and the functions have also been improved a lot. What follows is the increase of WiFi frequency bands without causing interference with each other, which requires high-performance filters to achieve the above functions.
Jeff Lin pointed out at the meeting that Qorvo has accumulated a lot of filters in the past years, and the company has also launched related filters according to needs, dividing the 5G frequency band of WiFi into two frequency bands: high and low. In order to better achieve this goal, Qorvo has also launched iFEM products, which directly integrate filters and PAs into RF front-end products, allowing customers to easily use this product to solve potential needs and challenges.
According to reports, thanks to Qorvo’s accumulation in BAW technology, the filters introduced by the company can not only be made very thin and small, but also have a good guarantee in terms of quality. As shown, the white product inside the yellow box is a traditional ceramic filter, while the solid blue rectangle represents Qorvo’s filter size, so you can see the advantage of its size. This is bound to help developers develop WiFi products that are more suitable for their needs.
With Qorvo’s BandBoost products, developers can also easily implement small and beautiful tri-band WiFi product designs. In addition to saving space, it also saves costs and shortens time to market.
Jeff Lin said that for the smart home, the core is the need to connect all the devices in the home. For the Pod architecture envisaged by Qorvo, not only the AP and all devices need to be stably connected, but also a stable backbone network to connect the APs. In order to meet such needs, the mesh network (mesh) was born. According to Jeff Lin, with a tri-band WiFi router, the 5G High Band can be used for signal transmission between APs, and the 5G Low Band can be used for the connection of terminals such as mobile phones and notebooks.
As shown in the figure below, there are four options for a WiFi mesh router design like this, among which “2+2+4” is a mesh network setting with the best cost and performance. The data shown in the figure below illustrates the benefits of using a four-way design for the backbone network. And about the advantages and disadvantages of this design, Jeff Lin also discussed in his speech.
Subsequently, Jeff Lin interprets WiFi 6E again. As he said, the biggest feature of WiFi 6E is the introduction of the 6Ghz frequency band to WiFi. That means that we do not need to use the above-mentioned split 5G frequency band to achieve a tri-band design, but choose a tri-band design of 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz and 6Ghz.
As we can see from the figure below, WiFi 6E has been supported in many countries and regions around the world, and some countries are still under evaluation. It is worth mentioning that the division of the 6Ghz frequency band between US regulations and European regulations is also different, which requires developers to pay attention.
“With the 6Ghz band, we recommend that the AP network be connected through the 6Ghz band, which will bring a better experience,” Jeff Lin said at the meeting. And for this new standard, Qorvo is ready, and the company’s FEM is ready to support customers.
In the speech, Jeff Lin also analyzed the regulations and backbone network throughput of WiFi 6E.
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