Atheros banking on Wilocity to help WiGig straddle Wi-Fi
The WiGig chip will be anything from "tricky" to "impossible" to build
Published: 16 July, 2010
READ MORE: Broadband | Wi-Fi | 802.11n | Mesh
Wilocity and Atheros plan to work together on a tri-band chip which speaks all forms of Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz), as well as working at 60 GHz using the new WiGig Wireless Gigabit specification. WiGig will transmit data at a raw PHY rate of 7 Gbps and it is seen both as Wi-Fi on steroids and a direct line of sight technology for transmitting HD video around a home.
The two plan to build a single component which will scale to the type of volumes and price points that Wi-Fi has achieved today.
Atheros has carved out a name for itself being one of the first to introduce MIMO antennas into the Wi-Fi equation, especially good for sending more data, more reliably, and has kept up with the falling price curve of Wi-Fi chips, capturing some of the biggest design wins in the industry. As a result, it was one of the major chip names, along with Intel and Broadcom, to back the WiGig standard.
But because Atheros is that much smaller, being around a tenth of the size of Broadcom, this is a kind of "bet the farm" proposition, and it will want to be on its game for the 60GHz implementation, hence its involvement with Wilocity, which has established 60 GHz experience.
Wilocity was formed by some ex-Intel Centrino techies and has been the wild card in 60GHz, involved with a number of the key initiatives, first pushing for the creation of the IEEE 802.11 Task Group working to speed up 802.11n using 60 GHz and then leading the creation of Wi-Fi Alliance 60 GHz Gigabit Wireless Marketing Task Group. Wilocity also pushes an idea it calls the wPCIe, which in short is a two way wireless bus (like the PCI bus) to transmit to peripherals at warp drive speeds, wire free.
The target chips are seen by various groups as somewhere between "tricky" and "impossible," and Atheros knows that if it can successfully blend Wi-Fi with WiGig on the same chip, it can continue the breakneck speed of the company's growth, which has seen it emerge from start up to $500 million powerhouse in a handful of years.
Atheros and Wilocity said in a statement that "tri-band" capabilities will enhance the performance and functionality of wireless devices to enable a variety of new computing and entertainment applications. And they see laptops and eventually handsets (although power constraints on the chips might push that a ways off) sending gigabyte class video files between themselves and HDTVs. WiGig will use the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer.
Many of the same players were previously involved in the WiMedia Alliance and tried to harness Ultra Wide Band in much the same way, but after more than five years of fruitless effort, gave up with the technology after it failed to deliver more than a few hundred Megabits per second, instead of Gigabit plus speeds.
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