MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, announced on Thursday that its Wi-Fi system on a chip (SoC), the RT6856, has been incorporated into D-Link’s latest Wi-Fi cloud routers.

The company said that as a global leader in connectivity, D-Link will be shipping several new cloud routers this spring. 

The MediaTek RT6856 Wi-Fi SoC contains a powerful 700 MHz MIPS® 34KEc™ CPU core and dual PCI Express interfaces to simultaneously enable two Wi-Fi streams for “dual band concurrent” home networks providing high quality data, voice and video applications.

This powerful SoC allows consumers to create two wireless networks both running at full bandwidth speeds, thus offering a significant increase in total network capacity. The MediaTek RT6856 also features two USB 2.0 interfaces for 3G/4G broadband connectivity, wireless printer sharing, or wireless storage applications; and SPI, I2C, I2S, and PCM interfaces for audio streaming and VoIP applications. Plus, this chip also includes the company’s field proven hardware support for Network Address Translation (NAT) that make its LAN to WAN routing performance five times faster than conventional software based products. 

“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,” Chung also went on to say. “We are grateful to MediaTek for supporting these joint development projects that further enrich our offerings to sales channels worldwide.”

"MediaTek’s RT6856 SoC with hardware NAT technology is suited perfectly for D-Link’s consumer-centric requirements: Rock solid wireless performance, whole home coverage, intuitive setup, and no customer service ‘truck rolls’," said SR Tsai, General Manager of MediaTek’s Wireless Connectivity & Networking Business Unit.