[jxj]

To my understanding, the main difficulties are:

1. The investment needed for a real "free" Wi-Fi chip is much higher than most people's (FPGA, DIY, enthusiast and garage guys) imagination. I won't go through all the complications (not only design, but also tool chain, cell libs, etc.) here. Just one hint: think how many thousands pages are there in the Wi-Fi standard pdf, and how many test cases/vectors would be extracted from that before the actual tape out.

2. The chip business is purely the game of volume – if we want to not just burn money, but actually make it successful from the business point of view. We discussed with some businessman, investors and big companies in the chip/Wi-Fi industry regarding the "free" Wi-Fi chip business opportunities and failed to convince any of them. In other words, so far, no serious man actually believes that the "free" Wi-Fi chip could be financially successful.

(Keep in mind the game of volume). A key question to you: Will you buy a Wi-Fi dongle (with free Wi-Fi chip) with higher price and lower performance/functionalities (This is the result of low investment and low volume compared to those big players: Qualcomm, Broadcom, Mediatek, Realtek, etc.)? Even if you say you will, could you estimate how many people are there like you in this world? For chip: NO volume == NO business.

This is Xianju who created the opensource Wi-Fi chip project openwifi: https://github.com/open-sdr

It is still in FPGA status, not a real chip yet. We have been working on this for 7 years (starting from the time project setup internally).