Welcome to the openwifi stand!

There are many WiFi chips around us. The WiFi router, the smart light, the TV, the phone, etc., all have WiFi chips inside. Ever imagine replacing those chips with an open-source chip?

openwifi, announced in FOSDEM’20, is the 1st opensource WiFi chip design (802.11a/g/n, ax is coming) which includes Verilog source code for the chip and C source code for the Linux driver. We have paved solid steps towards an open-source WiFi chip. Now if you have FPGA dev boards (listed on our github), you can download our design onto it and start to use this FPGA based WiFi in the same way as other commercial WiFi chips! The FPGA board could become WiFi AP, WiFi client, ad-hoc node or sniffer, etc. Just like a Raspberry PI!

Videos: The 1st demo, Flash 2020, Low latency gaming, FOSDEM 2020, Libreplanet 2021

Besides the standard WiFi functionality, it also has some special features.

  • 802.11a/g/n (802.11ax/WiFi6 is under development)
  • 20MHz bandwidth; 70 MHz to 6 GHz frequency range
  • Mode tested: Ad-hoc; Station; AP, Monitor
  • DCF (CSMA/CA) low MAC layer in FPGA (10us SIFS is achieved)
  • 802.11 packet injection and fuzzing
  • CSI sensing: Channel State Information, freq offset, equalizer to computer
  • CSI fuzzer -- anti sensing: Create artificial channel response in WiFi transmitter
  • [IQ capture]: real-time AGC, RSSI, IQ sample to computer. [Dual antenna version]
  • Configurable channel access priority parameters: duration of RTS/CTS, CTS-to-self, SIFS/DIFS/xIFS/slot-time/CW/etc
  • Time slicing based on MAC address (time gated/scheduled FPGA queues)
  • Easy to change bandwidth and frequency: 2MHz for 802.11ah in sub-GHz; 10MHz for 802.11p/vehicle in 5.9GHz

openwifi @ FOSDEM

All of those opensource hardware projects are focusing on the CPU side: RISC-V, all kinds of open CPU cores, Raspberry PI, many other PI, PINE64, openWRT, AI/machine-learning accelerators. However the radio connectivity part of those opensource hardware boards are still from black-box silicon (commercial chips, like WiFi chips from big companies). Openwifi project, which was announced in the FOSDEM'20, is the first attempt to build an opensource chip in the radio connectivity domain! Now we have tested the design on the FPGA development board (SDR -- Software Defined Radio), and it works well in the real world scenario. Meanwhile we also add some unique features that commercial chips don't have. We hope more people can come and think about the opensource activity in the radio chip domain, and invest more in this domain! We are also eager to seek people's voice and help about the idea of: Low cost SDR openwifi dongle (100usd?) and chip tape out!
Welcome to the openwifi stand

openwifi in 2022

Checkout openwifi update in these events this year:

Also feel free come to us for further discussion!