Deterministic Wireless Baseband
Meroplane's Air Interface changes the foundation. It is a digital baseband architecture that moves frame timing, retransmission windows, synchronization budgeting, and fast interference response out of best-effort software and into dedicated hardware. More stable behavior, more predictable recovery, and more usable spectrum in dense infrastructure deployments.
A coherent problem, served by chips designed for adjacent markets
Commodity wireless designs fail at an intersection nobody designed: interference handling, reacquisition timing, scheduler fairness, calibration, and telemetry, each built competently against its own target, none owning how they behave together in the field. Fixed wireless is a coherent problem, and it deserves a baseband designed for it, with one authority over timing, interference, scheduling, and the telemetry that reports on the same decisions the system is making. That is what Air Interface is.
Media Access Control / Hardware Scheduler Engine
Most radios are assemblies of good components. Air Interface is designed as a synchronized machine.
Its MAC / HSE coordinates the systems that matter most under load: frame and epoch timing, TX/RX switching, grants and maps, pilot placement, sounding cadence, calibration windows, retransmission timing, queue service, burst issuance, profile changes, and receiver feedback. These are not left to drift across firmware tasks and software timers. They are aligned to hardware execution boundaries and enforced in the fast path.
Cleaner handoff between subsystems, tighter recovery behavior, and more predictable execution when the channel, traffic mix, or interference environment turns hostile.
Conventional packet radios share time-sensitive MAC behavior with firmware, OS interrupts, and host CPUs. Under load, execution drifts. Air Interface executes that timing in hardware, isolated from OS jitter. The chart below shows the difference in arrival distribution.
Network operators need networks they can analyze and trust. HARQ and retry timing in Air Interface can be pre-allocated per operating profile, featuring fixed pipeline depth and defined ACK/NACK windows. This makes worst-case analysis, regression testing, and timing verification highly practical, something software-led architectures struggle to provide.
Every radio spends airtime on synchronization. The real question is how often the system has to repay the full acquisition cost.
Less airtime spent reacquiring the link. More airtime left for data.
Full acquisition is amortized across a scheduled burst.
Peak throughput claims only matter if the link can sustain them. Air Interface supports a wide operating ladder from robust low-order modes through 4096-QAM. Profiles are enabled only when the RF chain, synchronization state, and channel conditions justify them, and they are stepped down aggressively when they do not.
This is a platform for sustained throughput.
The architecture supports multiuser spatial separation in both uplink and downlink. With favorable array geometries and accurate calibration, operators can improve frequency reuse, supporting denser deployments even in highly fragmented spectrum.
Spectrum is expensive and often fractured. Air Interface is built for profile-driven bandwidth plans, fragmented sub-7 GHz operation, and multiple carrier-allocation postures on the same deterministic baseband family. That matters in U-NII 5 GHz, 6 GHz AFC, CBRS, and mixed licensed/unlicensed deployments where channel holdings, incumbents, and coexistence constraints shape real capacity more than a lab headline ever will.
Air Interface is designed to maximize whatever spectrum the operator can actually hold and keep.
Robust links in congested and contested RF
Air Interface is designed to maintain robust links in congested and contested RF environments. The receiver evaluates incoming signal quality using spatial, temporal, and structural indicators, then prioritizes inputs that remain consistent with the expected link while suppressing unreliable energy before decode.
When normal service is impaired, a resilient low-rate coordination mode helps devices maintain discovery, synchronization, and recovery behavior instead of failing abruptly.
Most interference is mundane. The architecture is designed first for the real problems infrastructure operators see every day: same-channel neighbors, sector bleed, bursty overlap, rooftop backhaul spillover, and irregular coexistence events in shared bands. The same posture scales to harsher contested-RF conditions.
One architecture. Any band.
Air Interface is frequency-agnostic. By decoupling the digital processing from the RF front-end, the baseband acts as one static foundation across all deployments.
One silicon architecture spans the family, from low-frequency NLOS rural links to high-capacity urban mmWave heads. Each family member processes a fixed, dense pipeline of logical I/Q streams. In sub-6 GHz designs, these map directly to fully digital beamforming. In mmWave, they map to digital streams feeding analog sub-arrays. The processing architecture does not change; only the physics at the antenna do.
Your digital mainboard, software stack, and management layer stay the same across your entire product portfolio. To enter a new market or address a new band, you simply swap the radio head.
The Meroplane Air Interface executes both Time Division Duplex (TDD) and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) profiles natively on the exact same baseband family. You do not need separate digital product lines, fragmented codebases, or parallel R&D teams to support different duplexing schemes.
This architecture is built from the silicon up to survive hostile deployments. Deep thermal monitoring, microsecond-level telemetry export, and deterministic, policy-driven throttling are baked directly into the system design, so it can run inside sealed, passive enclosures in extreme environments.
Air Interface targets fixed wireless and WISP infrastructure, carrier and private backhaul, tactical and contested-RF deployments, industrial automation, and critical public infrastructure. Each of these is covered in detail, with the specific deployment patterns and design targets, on the applications page.
One driver model. One management plane.
Air Interface enforces a strict, three-tier architectural boundary. Host load, OS jitter, and heavy management polling are isolated from the critical timing path.
The baseband exposes a static, deterministic control surface over PCIe or AXI. Integrators tune strict boundaries for timing, pilot density, and interference response. Switching RF bands or changing the physical radio head requires zero changes to this control stack.
A host-side daemon provides API and CLI access for fleet automation and configuration. Because this layer is architecturally decoupled from the real-time fast path, heavy telemetry polling and API calls stay outside the radio scheduler.
Dropped links rarely tell you why on their own. The Air Interface streams structured, deep-state telemetry covering scheduler utilization, localized interference profiles, thermal thresholds, and hardware-level recovery events. You get full visibility into the RF fast path without penalizing the line rate.
An independent internal timebase governs microsecond-level TDD scheduling, locked to strict external alignment via GNSS 1PPS or IEEE-1588 PTP. Frame boundaries are aggressively phase-locked across the deployment to support tight co-location timing and to suppress self-interference on dense towers.
The divide is structural, not statistical.
Conventional radios trap the critical fast path in software. By forcing host or embedded CPUs to manage microsecond-level timing, they introduce inherent jitter. When interference hits, they recover through a messy combination of rate collapse, total retraining, or dropped links.
Air Interface abandons this model. The difference is architectural reality:
Conventional: The host or embedded CPU babysits the timing loop.
Air Interface: Scheduling, HARQ retransmission, and interference response are executed in silicon. The fast path never waits on a software interrupt.
Conventional: Data sheets hide behind "average" latency, masking severe jitter under load.
Air Interface: Timing profiles are bounded. If a loop misses a cycle budget, the system faults deterministically rather than drifting silently.
Conventional: When an interferer appears, the radio blindly trusts the new energy, corrupting the channel state and collapsing the link rate.
Air Interface: The receiver isolates and deprioritizes unreliable energy, keeping the link productive on the portion of the channel that remains trustworthy.
Conventional: A severe jammer forces a complete disconnection, requiring the host OS to rebuild the link from scratch.
Air Interface: The system fails closed to a protected, low-rate recovery underlay. It holds synchronization and automatically promotes back to the high-throughput path once the channel clears.
Modern Wi-Fi 6/7 silicon adds valuable coexistence tools such as wider channels, puncturing, and multi-link operation. Those are important features, but they remain inside a contention-first, packet-first access model. Air Interface is aimed at a different job: operator-controlled infrastructure where scheduling, synchronization, retransmission timing, and fallback behavior must remain deterministic and inspectable at the system level.
With Air Interface, airtime, timing, recovery, and observability remain governed on purpose rather than left to best-effort software and opportunistic packet behavior.
Meroplane's Air Interface is a baseband SoC plus reference design package. Integrators build the finished radio.
Meroplane's deliverable is the digital engine: PHY/MAC processing, the hardware scheduler, datapath control, security primitives, DMA, and the software and documentation required for integration. The integrator retains full ownership over the RF front-end, host processor, power design, antennas, and final compliance validation.
The reference package covers board-level designs, driver source code, user-space management software, API documentation, manufacturing tests, and band-specific RF guidance.
Radio OEMs, infrastructure integrators, and defense program teams who want a scalable, reusable digital wireless platform while owning the physical radio stack and form factor.
Fixed wireless access, carrier backhaul, industrial robotics connectivity, private enterprise infrastructure, and mission-critical resilience-oriented wireless systems.
