The former's RT6856 Wi-Fi SoC is being put to good use

May 3, 2012 12:20 GMT  ·  By

MediaTek makes various connectivity chips and D-Link comes up with routers used in cloud environments, so the two decided to team up for once.

MediaTek has a certain Wi-Fi system-on-chip known as RT6856, based on a 700 MHz MIPS 34KEc CPU core.

It boasts dual PCI Express interfaces, which means that it can handle two Wi-Fi stream at once, enabling “dual band concurrent" home networks.

Voice, data and video applications all travel easily across the link, which means that customers run two wireless networks at once, at full bandwidth speeds, with a single processor.

To make things even more interesting, the chip integrated two USB 2.0 interfaces too, which can be adapted and used for 3G/4G broadband access, wireless printer sharing, audio streaming, VoIP, storage applications and a bunch of other things (like SPI, I2C, I2S, and PCM interfaces).

D-Link will be using the SoC in routers like the DIR-636L and DIR-826L. The high-performance hardware VPN accelerator for SMB-class networking applications will be of great help in the sort of cloud applications the two companies have in mind.

"D-Link's latest cloud routers, like the DIR-636L and DIR-826L, bring rich cloud applications to homes and offices with the help of the MediaTek RT6856's outstanding Wi-Fi and USB performance," said Jocelyn Chung, VP of marketing at D-Link Corporation.

"As a valued partner, MediaTek's solution delivers many features tailored to the cloud computing environment which has helped D-Link to significantly accelerate product planning and development. We are grateful to MediaTek for supporting these joint development projects that further enrich our offerings to sales channels worldwide."

MediaTek has a nice big product page for the RT6856, so go here and check it out. The most relevant bits, besides what we've already mentioned, are the intelligent clock scaling, DDRI/II - ODT off, self-refresh mode, 128 bytes of SDRAM and 8 Gb NAND.