What you need to know
- MediaTek announced its new MT7903 chipset at CES 2025, in collaboration with Google, arriving by mid-2025.
- This Filogic family chip supports tri-band Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6, and IEEE 802.15.4 for smart home devices.
- It is designed for Google Home devices with support for Thread and Matter.
Google Home devices are about to get much faster and more consistent when connecting with or commanding one another. Google and MediaTek collaborated to create the new MediaTek MT7903 chipset, coming in the first half of 2025, in order to "facilitate widespread adoption of Thread."
This "Filogic-branded chipset" supports tri-band Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6, and IEEE 802.15.4. The latter is a well-known WPAN standard used by Matter, Thread, and other smart home standards where devices communicate.
The MediaTek MT7903 has a low power feature called "Thread border router offload." If a Google Home device goes to sleep, the MT7903 will remain awake and connected with other smart home devices, saving energy in standby mode while remaining alert for commands at any moment.
While this chip may not hit Wi-Fi 7, the current speediest option, MediaTek says this chip is designed to "make it more affordable and seamless for manufacturers to integrate Thread into their devices." Cutting-edge wireless might price it out of the range of affordable smart home tech, and considering many smart home devices are stuck on 2.4GHz, Wi-Fi 6E with 6GHz support would still be a massive upgrade for many devices.
Google Home hubs like the Nest Hub or Google TV Streamer 4K are also Matter hubs, interoperable with any recent smart home tech that complies with the latest standards like Matter 1.4. The more devices that use chips like the MediaTek MT7903, the easier it'll be for Google Assistant or Gemini commands to trigger automation without frustrating delays.
Google, which just announced at CES 2025 that it would be bringing Gemini commands to Google TV, has been a major proponent of the Matter standard and Thread protocol. It's unsurprising to us that it would team up with MediaTek on this endeavor, laying out what partners will need to connect with its hub products.
This chip could also appear in the leaked Nest Hub Max successor, which we hope will arrive in 2025. Google's smart display also supported 802.15.4 and Thread, but remains stuck on Wi-Fi 5GHz and Bluetooth 5. A new Nest Hub with the MediaTek MT7903 and a faster NPU for Gemini commands could be a smart home game-changer.
