Qualcomm sets the pace in digital home Wi-Fi
Published: 4 June, 2009
Qualcomm has fired a powerful shot across the bows of Broadcom as the two fabless chip giants increasingly tread on one another's toes, despite their recent patent truce. The CDMA leader is leapfrogging more established WLan chipmakers, and cashing in on its 2006 acquisition of Airgo at last, by becoming the first major to announce an 802.11n chipset for whole-home video, featuring 4x4 MIMO antenna arrays.
Qualcomm is looking to diversify its business into areas, such as the connected home, where Broadcom has been highly successful, and 802.11n is increasingly looking like the key technology for transmitting high definition video around houses, with alternatives like UltraWideBand or 60GHz either sidelined or over the horizon.
At the Computex show in Taiwan this week, Qualcomm showed off two Wi-Fi products. One is targeted at dual-mode Wi-Fi/cellular handsets, a sector where both Qualcomm and Broadcom shine because of their skills in integration. But the second is far more radical - the N-Stream Wireless Lan WCN13, which delivers 600Mbps of raw data performance with four radios, dual-band support and a four-antenna MIMO array (the only other vendor to sample a 4x4 802.11n product has been start-up Quantenna, which has not gone commercial yet, but claims its product can be configured in a pair, to deliver up to 1Gbps).
By contrast, Atheros, whose MIMO implementations underpin much of the 11n standard, maintains that it makes little sense to go beyond 3x3 arrays because of cost and power considerations. The N-Stream chip claims to have solved these problems and created a throughput of around 600Mbps for distributing multiple simultaneous HDTV streams throughout the home - via sophisticated algorithms that take advantage of the multiple transmitters and receivers to increase data throughput, extend range and overcome interference.
Qualcomm really showed its hand in advanced WLan technologies and IPR when it acquired Airgo, a heavily backed start-up whose advanced MIMO smart antenna technology had been the basis of many products that appeared mid-decade, pre-empting the draft 802.11n standard. Nokia-funded Airgo looked set to provide the key MIMO technology for that IEEE standard, until it was wrongfooted in mid-2004 by Intel and Broadcom, which got behind a rival approach from Atheros that included the option to use wide 40MHz channels.
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