Chip solution combines WiFi, Bluetooth, doppler radar

Celeno’s new CL6000 ‘Denali’ product family provides a connectivity and sensing solution for devices such as consumer multimedia devices, IoT end points, home automation, industry automation, and healthcare applications. These new chips enable cloud connectivity with the latest WiFi 6/6E standard, audio streaming and on-boarding use cases with BT and BLE 5.2 support, and sensing functions to enrich edge AI with valuable sensed data through its Doppler Radar function.

The product family supports both WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E standards with the latest advancements driving superior latency and robust connectivity, even in the most crowded WiFi deployments. These include high bandwidth 160MHz channels, the new, recently approved 6-7GHz spectrum band, MU-OFDMA, MU-MIMO, Beamforming, 1024QAM, WPA3 encryption and Target Wake Time (TWT) for more efficient device power saving.

The CL6000 product family supports true simultaneous operation of WiFi connectivity and Doppler Radar. The Doppler Radar is a WiFi based, high-resolution sensing technology, that employs the Doppler effect and standard WiFi packets.

The technology can track an object’s location or sense its presence or motion characteristics by using a single WiFi device, without requiring the assistance of multiple devices or additional WiFi clients. The solution leverages standard WiFi and operates in the 5GHz and 6GHz bands, to ‘see’ through walls without requiring line of sight and/or dependence on light conditions. In addition, the technology does not depend on any WiFi clients, wearables of any kind and does not invade privacy.

Application examples

The CL6020/10 can provide high speed WiFi and BT/BLE connectivity for smart TVs and smart speakers to enable cloud connectivity and video share use cases.

The CL6025 can be selected to add sensing capabilities to multimedia devices, such as identifying human presence near the device or even for counting the number of TV viewers for driving various operational and monetisation applications. 

The CL6020/10 enables connectivity of IoT functions in sensors and cameras, to drive cloud-based security, safety and preemptive maintenance applications in smart buildings and factories.

Alternatively, by using the CL6025, the added radar function enables presence location and even posture recognition for supporting additional useful applications in buildings and homes, including human monitoring, elderly care and fall detection.

“We are excited to bring this disruptive solution to the WiFi industry,” said Gilad Rozen, CEO and Founder of Celeno. “Celeno has been recognised for its innovative WiFi solutions for home networking infrastructure applications. Our new CL6000 product family extends our product portfolio into the large WiFi client markets, bringing together connectivity and sensing into smart home, IoT and multimedia devices.”

Main product variants

The product family consists of three main variants which offer optimised solutions for both high performance and price conscious applications:

• CL6025 – Supports 2T2R (2 Transmit and 2 Receive) MIMO configuration, tri-band selectable (2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz), BT/BLE 5.2 and WiFi Doppler Radar – combined connectivity and sensing chip.
• CL6020 - Supports 2T2R (2 Transmit and 2 Receive) MIMO configuration, tri-band selectable (2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz), and BT/BLE 5.2 connectivity chip.
• CL6010 – Supports 1T1R (1 Transmit and 1 Receive) MIMO configuration, tri-band selectable (2.4 / 5 / 6 GHz) and BLE 5.2 connectivity chip.

The ‘Denali’ CL6000 product family also shares the following main characteristics:

• Maximum traffic throughput of 2.4Gbps
• Internal RF Front End
• Host interfaces: PCIe-2 / USB3 / USB2 / UART
• Wafer Level Chip Scale Package (WLCSP)

The CL6000 product family will start sampling with customers in the first quarter of 2022.