Qorvo, UWB, and Enterprise Wi-Fi Access Points

A struggle in most industrial facilities is that legacy location technologies simply can’t provide high precision in complex indoor environments. For example, operators frequently find that GPS signals can’t penetrate dense warehouse structures or multistory hospital wings. While Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) can deliver basic proximity metrics, it lacks the fine-grained accuracy needed for high-stakes asset management. 

Using Qorvo Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology, engineers can overcome these constraints. UWB technology helps create a connectivity layer that handles both high-speed Wi-Fi data transfer and high-precision location awareness.

Pulse-Based Time of Flight Physics 

UWB is a time-of-flight technology, meaning that it measures the exact time it takes short radio pulses to travel between a transmitter and a receiver. 

A key reason UWB achieves such high accuracy is its 500 MHz signal bandwidth. Because a receiver must sample a signal at least twice its bandwidth, wider bandwidth means finer time resolution, and finer time resolution means finer distance resolution. At 500 MHz, UWB resolves to approximately 15 centimeters, compared to roughly 1 meter for 80 MHz Wi-Fi Fine Timing Measurement (FTM) and several meters for RSSI-based systems. This gives UWB a structural accuracy advantage of five to ten times greater than the next best wireless ranging option.

Most time-of-flight technologies suffer from multipath reflections, where signals bounce off surfaces and create interference that typically degrades accuracy in other wireless standards. Qorvo solves this issue with UWB transmitters that emit extremely short 500 MHz-wide pulses centered around the 8 GHz frequency band. The 2 ns duration of these pulses allows sensors to distinguish the direct-path signal from reflected signals, effectively mitigating this issue.

And, by calculating the time of flight instead of relying on signal strength as in other location technologies, UWB’s measurements are immune to the fading and fluctuations common in industrial zones. Designers can then use these physical layer properties to maintain a stable location lock even when the line of sight is partially obstructed by environmental clutter. 

The Synergy of UWB and Wi-Fi 7 

Using Qorvo-integrated SoCs, network architects can deploy UWB anchors as native components in Wi-Fi 7 access points. This integration allows teams to centralize both UWB ranging and enterprise connectivity within a single hardware footprint, regardless of the transport or backhaul used to carry RTLS data upstream. By centralizing both communication and location services this way, organizations can avoid the capital expenditure of a parallel anchor deployment. Leveraging the existing EAP footprint can significantly reduce the need for additional dedicated localization infrastructure, avoiding the hardware, installation, and cabling costs that standalone UWB anchor deployments typically require—where adding a single dedicated anchor or EAP can cost several thousand dollars in installation and cabling alone.

Qorvo's coexistence tools let the UWB system share spectrum with the Wi-Fi 7 radio without packet collisions or spectral crowding, and that same high-speed wireless layer can synchronize clocks across multiple UWB anchors for nanosecond-level timing accuracy. The result is a single unified infrastructure (rather than two networks managed separately) that delivers both simpler deployment and stronger real-time performance.

Equally impactful is the expertise Qorvo has in RF filter design. As Wi-Fi 6 GHz and UWB 8 GHz channels occupy adjacent spectrum, high-performance filtering lets both radio chains coexist within the same access point enclosure without degrading each other.

The Standards and Ecosystems for Interoperability 

UWB ranging between tags and anchors can be implemented in several ways. Some approaches are fully proprietary to a given vendor, and others are built on open standards that ensure interoperability across devices and platforms. 

Qorvo aligned its hardware with leading standards bodies to give organizations greater long-term flexibility. Specifically, Qorvo hardware adheres to FiRa Consortium standards, a global organization that provides protocols for engineers to easily build interoperable systems. This compliance matters because it means UWB components from different vendors can communicate and rank distances consistently, freeing organizations from single-vendor lock-in and letting them mix hardware as deployments scale.

To protect these interactions, Qorvo provides a distance-bounding protocol that meets IEEE 802.15.4z requirements, preventing sophisticated relay attacks and spoofing. By precisely measuring the distance between devices, the bounding protocol unlocks applications in secure authentication and proximity-based automation that were previously hard to achieve. 

Beyond FiRA, Qorvo works closely with omlox. As a primary standard for industrial locating, omlox provides a vendor-neutral interface that allows engineers to integrate various positioning technologies into a single, cohesive network. Enterprise access point vendors increasingly prefer standardized ranging frameworks like FiRa and omlox—with which Qorvo chips fully comply—as demonstrated by real-world deployments such as Cisco Spaces' FiRa-compliant UWB ranging and Juniper Networks' omlox location services. With greater interoperability and design freedom, organizations can reduce per-unit costs as they scale their location services.

Infrastructure-Free Scaling 

Beyond ease of deployment, UWB is compelling for the return on investment that follows when 20 cm accuracy replaces coarser alternatives.

First, designers can simply add standard Wi-Fi 7 access points to their existing network infrastructure to significantly expand coverage across locations. That means that with integrated UWB, teams can avoid the labor-intensive process of running new power and data cables, which is typically required for standalone anchors. Standard Wi-Fi planning tools such as Ekahau and Hamina are already integrating UWB ranging into their Wi-Fi installation products, enabling designers to use GPS and UWB data together to simplify access point placement and orientation during installation.

With automated placement capabilities, teams can create high-performance network designs that adapt dynamically to changes in the physical environment. Once established, these systems can support tens of thousands of individual tags within a single facility without overwhelming the radio frequency environment. 

Further, low-power UWB tags can operate for years on battery, which significantly reduces the long-term maintenance requirements for large-scale deployments. With inherent power efficiency, these tags help engineers track massive inventories. Meanwhile, the 20 cm accuracy they provide—offering room-level precision that enables systems to distinguish exactly which side of a wall an asset is on—unlocks asset-recovery, geofencing, and workflow automation use cases that coarser location technologies simply can’t support.

Enterprise Use Cases 

Optimizing Smart Factory Workflows 

Production managers can use UWB and Wi-Fi to track high-value tools and mobile assets with 20 cm accuracy to facilitate assembly line transitions. 

To understand the practical value, consider a technician who needs a specific tool at an assembly station but doesn't have it. They check where it should be, ask nearby coworkers, and then visually scan the floor. This process can easily consume 10 to 20 minutes per incident. 

Using UWB RTLS, the technician can instead query a location app and walk directly to the tool, resolving the search in under a minute. By eliminating this unproductive search time for an entire workforce, manufacturing teams can reduce lead times by up to 50%. 

Other UWB RTLS benefits include:

• Optimizing workflows by designing systems that automatically log the movement of parts through every stage of the fabrication process.

• Enhancing individual safety with UWB-enabled handheld devices that provide real-time alerts when workers inadvertently approach a hazard.

• Implementing geofencing protocols that automatically disable machinery if a worker enters a restricted safety zone.

In the real world, SEG Automotive used Qorvo technology to implement these tactics and successfully reallocate 15% of its workforce to higher-value tasks. Ultimately, the unified ecosystems created by Qorvo offered improved operational efficiency and personnel safety.

Advanced Healthcare Logistics 

Hospital staff can use integrated RTLS to monitor the real-time locations of medical devices and patients. For example, nurses can use UWB tracking to locate the nearest available emergency equipment in seconds rather than minutes.

Beyond equipment tracking, facility designers can use UWB to create comprehensive patient safety systems that monitor movements to prevent falls or unauthorized departures from specialized care units. Similarly, technical teams can use location data to analyze asset movement patterns and identify bottlenecks in patient intake and discharge procedures.

Conclusion 

The convergence of UWB and Wi-Fi 7 is a major change in how organizations approach indoor spatial awareness. A key element driving this shift is the support for UWB-based indoor navigation directly on standard smartphones. By combining consumer smartphone adoption (allowing workers or patients to locate tools or offices with standard iOS or Android devices instead of relying on expensive third-party hardware) with integrated infrastructure deployment, organizations can deploy highly precise location systems that are both affordable and easy to scale.

As Wi-Fi 7 becomes the standard for enterprise connectivity, Qorvo's integrated UWB approach gives organizations a way to add precise location services (asset tracking and indoor navigation) without deploying separate infrastructure.