Marvell Claims Industry's First 'Mobile MIMO' Wi-Fi Solution

As the promise of seamless connectivity fast becomes a reality, Wi-Fi provides a common link across many different mobile devices, said Weili Dai, Marvell's Co-Founder. The Avastar 88W8797 represents a breakthrough for our industry: for the very first time the powerful performance of MIMO technology is now available and practical for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. By integrating multiple cutting-edge technologies and several low-power radios into a single system-on-a-chip, the Avastar solution ushers in an exciting new era in mobile computing and communications.

Poor wireless performance in first-generation tablets has been widely attributed to the limitation of single antenna design and placement. Given a tablet's unique industrial form factor, device designers and manufacturers have little flexibility in the physical location of the antenna on the device. Marvell's new Mobile MIMO technology alleviates this challenge by adding a second transceiver in a true MIMO configuration. Offering Wi-Fi data rates up to 300Mbps, the Avastar 88W8797 can double the performance available on today's mobile products, enabling new, high-bandwidth media applications regardless of the device's spatial orientation. By allowing flexibility in the placement of two antennas on the device, robust performance is ensured even if one antenna is partially or completely obstructed.

The Avastar 88W8797 comes equipped with Tx beamforming technology, enabling a far more expansive network range when compared with existing 11n 2x2 products. The Avastar 88W8797 also supports the Bluetooth low-energy ecosystem, allowing communication with a new breed of mobile devices, including body sensors for personal health monitoring and remote controls for home automation and other applications. The Avastar 88W8797 is also well-suited to other products that require MIMO Wi-Fi performance such as home media servers, notebook computers, set-top-boxes, and digital televisions.

Marvell will be demonstrating the Avastar 88W8797 in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress (Courtyard CY15) and is already sampling the device to customers.