At Electronica, Renesas Reveals Wi-Fi Roadmap, Car Radar Tech, and More

Last week was Electronica 2022, which means that many of the biggest players in the industry took the stage to discuss their vision for the future. Among these were Renesas Electronics, who used the event as an opportunity to unveil its Wi-Fi roadmap as well as a handful of other announcements.

 

Renesas’ Dr. Sailish Chittipeddi presenting at Electronica 2022

 

AllAboutCircuits had the opportunity to meet with Renesas at the conference last week and hear a presentation from Dr. Sailesh Chittipeddi, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the IoT and Infrastructure Business Unit at Renesas about the new announcements.

In this article, we’ll cover what we learned first-hand from Renesas to better understand the company's vision for the future.

 

Renesas’ Wi-Fi Roadmap

The first major announcement from Renesas at Electronica 2022 was in regard to their Wi-Fi roadmap for the near-term future.

Last year, Renesas made big news with its acquisition of Celeno, which was largely done in order to benefit Renesas’ connectivity portfolio. Now, with a year of assimilation completed, Renesas is planning on leveraging Celeno’s technology to be a key pillar of their Wi-Fi Roadmap.

Specifically, Renesas’ roadmap will focus on addressing client needs for Wi-Fi and access point technologies for Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7 in the coming years. According to Chittepeddi, Renesas “expects Wi-Fi 7 is going to reach higher volume manufacturing in the 2024 time frame with all of the product announcements being made now. We expect about 1B Wi-Fi 7 devices to be shipped by about the 2027 time frame."

To address this, Renesas plans on leveraging Celeno’s CL8000 family, an act that Chittepeddi is calling “one of the first synergy effects that we see with the Celano acquisition."

 

At Electronica 2022, AllAboutCircuits Editor-in-Chief Jeff Child talks with Lior Weiss—from the Celeno team—about Renesas’ Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7 roadmap.

 

With respect to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, Renesas is currently engaged in the development of a couple of interesting products. One of these products is a highly integrated 2x2 Wi-Fi/BLE combo chip that shares support for Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth, and BLE 5.2. The chip is a tri-band switchable radio (6 GHz, 5 GHz, and 2.4 GHz) and hopes to find applications in multimedia streaming use cases, IoT gateways, and cloud-connected devices. 

Further, Renesas has stated its plans to develop a Wi-Fi 6E chipset to be used for Wi-Fi Doppler Imaging. The chip will leverage patented Wi-Fi Radar technology to determine the range and doppler signature of objects using standard Wi-Fi signals.

 

NB-IoT-Capable Wireless Module

Moving past Wi-Fi, Renesas also announced a new low-power WAN product at the trade fair. Dubbed the RYZ024A, the device is a WAN module that expands on its predecessor, the RYZ014A. Whereas the RYZ014A featured Cat-M1 wireless connection capabilities, the RYZ024A expands on this with the addition of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) connectivity options.

 

Block diagram of the RYZ024A. Image used courtesy of Renesas

 

NB-IoT is a significant value add for the module, as the wireless technology is inherently power efficient. According to Renesas, the addition of NB-IoT enables the RYZ024A to achieve power consumptions as low as 1uA in power savings mode while supporting voltage ranges from 2.2 V to 5.5V. For broad connectivity, the device also features a 20 dBm and 23 dBm power amplifier output.

With the RYZ024A, Renesas hopes to expand its low-power WAN portfolio to fill the needs of connected devices such as smart cities and smart homes.

 

Automotive Radar Transceivers

The final piece of news to come from Renesas at Electronica 2022 was the announcement of the company’s first family of automotive radar transceivers. Marking the company’s foray into the automotive radar market, the new device, the RAA270205, is a 4x4-channel 76-81 GHz transceiver meant specifically for ADAS applications.

Specifically, the device was designed on a 28 nm RF CMOS process and is described as a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), which was designed for long-range forward-looking radar and 4D radar applications.

 

Block diagram of the RAA270205. Image used courtesy of Renesas

 

To achieve this, the RAA270205 is designed with 4 transmitter channels and 4 receiver channels and is capable of supporting up to 16 MIMO channels. Additionally, the device features an onboard range-FFT engine and a 112.5 MSPS ADC. Altogether, the device is said to achieve a 5 GHz bandwidth, a 1.2 W power consumption, a noise figure of 9 dB, and a chip rate up to 300 MHz/μs.

According to Renesas, these specifications make the RAA270205 have the best accuracy in its class, 50% lower power consumption than competitors, and a 3dB lower noise floor than competitors.