Celeno Launches CL8000 Wi-Fi 6 Silicon Family With ElasticMIMO™ – Self-Adapting 8T8R Concurrent Dual Band PCIe Chip for Homes and Businesses

Celeno , the leading provider of smart, managed Wi-Fi solutions, today announced the launch of CL8000, a new Wi-Fi 6 product family chip, with a disruptive 8T8R (8 Transmit and 8 Receive) ElasticMIMO™ architecture that delivers the best Wi-Fi network performance for its size. Celeno’s technology combines a flexible silicon architecture that enables Access Points to dynamically self-adapt the radios configuration between the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and in the future 6GHz bands, to ensure the best user experience. Using two concurrent dual band Wi-Fi-6 Radios in a single 11x11mm PCIe chip, supporting 8T8R (8 Transmit and 8 Receive radio chains) elastic architecture and an optimization engine, the system will address the #1 challenge for Wi-Fi - delivering high-quality experience anywhere, anytime, and on any device based on real Wi-Fi usage patterns.

While Access Points are currently hard-wired at design and in production, and are typically over-engineered to compensate for rare challenging conditions, Celeno offers an innovative concept for Access Point designs and Wi-Fi network deployments: a combination of silicon and software technology, that continuously monitors Wi-Fi usage patterns in real time and self-adapts respectively the Access Point hardware MIMO dimensioning and antenna allocation in each band to maximize performance, coverage and user satisfaction. Wi-Fi conditions are unpredictable: no home or office looks alike; Access Point location is unpredictable and Wi-Fi usage patterns vary (type of client capabilities, where and how they are being used during day time and weekends, etc.). Allocating dynamically the 8T8R streams and radio channels between the longer range 2.4GHz band and the faster 5GHz band can help to better satisfy the Wi-Fi needs of the user.

ElasticMIMO™ with the aid of Celeno’s real time optimization engine dynamically allocates its 8T8R MIMO system to two Wi-Fi radios – in 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands based on usage needs, creating an elastic MIMO configuration ranging from 2x2 and up to 6x6 per each Wi-Fi radio – totaling 8 streams, 8 antennas and 6Gbps total throughput. The ElasticMIMO™ technology also offers APIs, so Service Providers and OEMs can adapt the system behavior to their specific business needs.
“With ElasticMIMO™, Celeno is re-defining how we think about Wi-Fi and the best approach to upgrade its performance,” said Gilad Rozen, Founder and CEO of Celeno. “Traditionally, to evolve the Wi-Fi standard, vendors have focused on increasing the physical speed of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi 6 provides incremental technologies to improve performance in dense deployments. By applying an Elastic MIMO architecture, Celeno adds a new dimension of self-adaptive radio hardware that will help deliver best customer experience to Wi-Fi 6 users, while also providing better connectivity and coverage to legacy clients.”

“With nearly 4 billion Wi-Fi devices shipping every year, service providers face a momentous challenge of providing Wi-Fi coverage in homes where network congestion and bandwidth requirements are growing with increasing mobile video, multi-room gaming, smart home, and broadcast video traffic,” said Michael Palma, Research Director for Enabling Technologies and Semiconductor research team at IDC. “Service providers need tools and technologies to optimize Wi-Fi coverage, while balancing engineering, footprint, BOM costs, aesthetics with ever growing user demands for better Wi-Fi performance.”

“Wi-Fi networks are key to everyday life of our customers and business partners. Wi-Fi 6 is a promising evolution and the fact it applies to both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands is encouraging,” Said Gavin Sheldon, VP Connectivity at Liberty Global. “It is challenging to predict the future usage rates in each Wi-Fi band and the penetration pace of Wi-Fi 6 devices. The concept of Elastic MIMO is promising and could help to take out the guesswork from the Access Point design and to help adjust to changing usage trends in the field. We look forward to continuing to evaluate this technology alongside other Wi-Fi 6 implementations as we aim to further enhance and future proof the customer experience.”

• CL8000 product family details:
  - Two concurrent dual band Wi-Fi radios in a single PCIe 11x11mm chip
  - Up to total capacity of eight (8) 802.11ax streams and 6Gbps of traffic speed
  - No external DDR memory is required for the Wi-Fi chip
  - Celeno will be offering the CL8080 8T8R chip as well as the CL8060, a 6T6R chip and the CL8040, a 4T4R chip.

The technology is showcased at the Venetian Palazzo Hospitality Suites at CES in Las Vegas from January 8th-11th2019.