Qualcomm Launches the QCA6390 Chipset: 1.8 Gbps Wi-Fi 6 Ready with BlueTooth 5.1

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With the upcoming ratification of the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard expected in August, a number of companies are gearing up with Wi-Fi 6 ‘ready’ routers and end-points to get the jump on the market. The idea is that the standard won’t change much between now and full ratification, and most companies developing chipsets expect to sail through without issues – the only difference between the companies will be on the ‘optional’ portions of the specifciations. With that, as we saw at Qualcomm’s Tech Day at the end of 2018, the company will be pushing its latest Wi-Fi 6 solutions onto the market. Today is the launch of one of the chipsets, the QCA6390, which also incorporates BlueTooth 5.1.

Qualcomm’s newest chip, built on a 14FF CMOS process, will support up to 1.8 Gbps of Wi-Fi 6 bandwidth over a combined 1024-QAM dual-band (5 GHz and 2.4 GHz simultaneous, up to 80 MHz) connection, as well as WPA3 security, enhanced BlueTooth 5.1, and additional optional features to the Wi-Fi 6 specification. Two of those optional features relate to Target Wake-Up Time, allowing devices to wake quicker and use less power doing do (up to 67% better power efficiency), and 8-stream sounding, which supports multiple devices doing high-data rate actions without network congestion. There will be additional proprietary power and performance benefits for users with Qualcomm silicon as both the host and the devices.

One of the key philosophies of Qualcomm’s wireless strategy is that WAN and WLAN are developed in tandem, rather than in isolation. As the WAN or WLAN standards improve, the other has to meet it with similar updates for performance, power, and efficiency. Qualcomm states that as we move into a 5G era, with condensed networks of users performing high-bandwidth operations simultaneously from multiple devices, technologies like 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will sustain a core part of the company’s wireless portfolio. We have already found devices that use both the recently released X55 modem, along with the new QCA6390.

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