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In 2012, Wi-Fi is going gigabit, with two platforms - 802.11ac and 802.11ad (or WiGig) - standardizing the way that 802.11 signals are ramped up to superfast, HD-capable rates using wide bands, MIMO arrays of up to 4x4 antennas, and other techniques. Most expect 11ac, which uses conventional 5GHz spectrum, to become a mass market technology this year, and Broadcom has become the first tier one chip supplier to announce commercial silicon for the standard.

General 11ac activity will be intense at the CES show next week, even before the standard is finalized. Start-up Quantenna sounded the starting gun in November with the first commercial 11ac silicon, as part of its battle with Celeno for the MIMO-driven HD video market. Another small player targeting a very specific space is Redpine, which got 11ac into a handset implementation before the holiday, but this year will see announcements from the big league players like Broadcom and Qualcomm Atheros.

The 11ac standard harnesses 80MHz channels in the 5GHz band for super-high bandwidth applications like HD video. While Atheros has decided to wait until the standard is finalized to deliver its own product, Broadcom will make a splash at CES. This week it announced its first family of 802.11ac chips, promising three times the speed and up to six times the power efficiency of equivalent 11n products. Like Quantenna, Broadcom is mainly targeting home video equipment, although 11ac may find its way into the firm's highly integrated, multi-standard smartphone SoCs in future.

Broadcom's family of what its marketing folk like to call '5G Wi-Fi solutions' comprises the BCM4360, BCM4352, BCM43526 and BCM43516. All these support 80MHz channels and 256QAM modulation plus transmit and receive beamforming. The BCM4360 supports the PCIe interface and implements three-stream 802.11ac specifications, reaching speeds up to 1.3Gbps. The BCM4352 and BCM43526 implement two-stream specs to reach up to 867Mbps, with the former supporting the PCIe interface and the latter USB. The BCM43516, also a USB model, has just one stream and speeds up to 433Mbps. The PCIe silicon is aimed at PCs, access points and routers, while USB variants are geared to consumer electronics products like TVs.

The chips are designed on a 40nm manufacturing process, and work with all legacy 802.11 standards as well as other standards like Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth and NFC. The silicon is currently being sampled to selected early access partners. Customer endorsements were offered at launch by Buffalo, Belkin, LG, Lenovo, D-Link, Huawei, Microsoft, Motorola, Netgear, Tenda, Ubee and ZTE, indicating the scale of Broadcom's reach in the Wi-Fi space - and with its famously good market timing, the need for Atheros to have something up its sleeve soon.

Rahul Patel, VP of Broadcom's mobile and wireless group, told IDG recently he sees 11ac as best placed for mass market adoption in the home video space. He believes another candidate, Wireless HDMI, is faster but is too expensive for mass deployment, while WiGig is complementary rather than a standalone system. He is also positive about the way that 11ac will finally leave the congested 2.4GHz band behind in Wi-Fi and make greater use of 5GHz. Previous 802.11 variants were either dual-band or 2.4GHz-only (apart from the somewhat underused 11a release), and Patel estimates that 90% to 95% of Wi-Fi devices still operate in the 2.4GHz spectrum, which has only three non-overlapping channels. The 5GHz band, the only option for 11ac, has 20 channels.

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