Researchers at Intel have come up with a way to make WiFi faster and more energy efficient.
It’s a chip called Rosepoint, and although it’s just a research project today, it could show up in mobile phones and laptop computers by the middle of the decade.
Rosepoint represents a breakthrough that Intel engineers have been hammering away at for years. They’ve been able to digitize little blocks of radio components in the past, but now they’ve managed to put a digital 2.4 GHz WiFi radio on a chip, right next to one of their low-power Atom central processing units (CPUs).
When Intel’s chips start to hit the market they will have “state of the art power efficiency” and superior signal quality, says Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner. It will reduce the chip count on the cell phone, which will reduce the cost and the complexity of manufacturing of the phone and improve battery life.
But it’s not easy to do one of these wireless system-on-a-chip designs. Wireless radios and CPUs aren’t exactly ideal roommates. Both parties emit radiation that can mess with the other. To fix this, Intel has had to come up with noise canceling and radiation-shielding techniques for the chips.
Intel has even worked out techniques for putting radio antennas on-chip, but it isn’t talking about them for another year or two.
