While the field of long-range wireless communications has seen tremendous growth over the past decade, its counterpart, short-range wireless has not kept pace.
High-speed, wireless Internet is possible at home today, but data transfer between a desktop personal computer and a mobile phone, portable media player, or a camera still often requires a USB cable. Bluetooth has been changing this scenario, but it offers very low data transfer speeds compared to cable, and would take a long time to transfer a high-definition video file, for example.
The most promising of short-range wireless standards has been the 60 GHz standard, which has the potential for rapid transfer speeds at short distances. However, the progress of even this technology has been held back due to the challenges in designing a compliant transceiver chip. In addition, this technology has been too power hungry for practical purposes in portable devices and the cost has been too high.
Frost & Sullivan believes that this situation is however all set to change as researchers from the Georgia Electronic Design Centre (GEDC) at Atlanta-based Georgia Institute of Technology, have now developed a 60 GHz chip that is said to address all the above challenges. The novel chip offers a high level of integration, and hence offers very low levels of power consumption, which also reduces the total cost involved.
The research, spearheaded by Joy Laskar, a member of the Ecma 60 GHz standards committee and director of GEDC, represents a significant advance in this field. It paves the way for speeding up the commercialisation of new short-range wireless applications.
The novel chip has been designed using complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which facilitates the low cost as well as low power consumption. The highly integrated chip is capable of transmitting digital radio frequency (RF) signals in the 60 GHz range, and combines both CMOS digital radio capability and multigigabit signal processing in an ultra-compact package.
This development is quite significant in that it is the world’s most integrated and compact chip for 60 GHz applications and represents the highest level of integration for 60 GHz wireless single-chip solutions. The sophisticated chip design also offers the lowest energy per bit transmitted wirelessly at multigigabit data rates reported to date. The researchers have, in addition, achieved very high speeds for data transfer rates – 15 Gbps at a distance of 1 metre, 10 Gbps at 2 metres, and 5 Gbps at 5 metres, which are unprecedented for this standard.
This chip is the first 60 GHz embedded chip for multimedia, multigigabit wireless use, and could open up a multitude of potential 60 GHz applications. These include, besides virtually wireless desktop PC setups, also wireless data centres, wireless home video systems, and perhaps more commonly, the potential to transfer gigabytes of photos, music, movies and videos from cameras and media players to a PC near-instantaneously.
Another potential application of this technology is the possibility of in-store kiosks, which can facilitate rapid transfer of high-definition movies and music files to handheld media players, perhaps for a small price. This could also lead to new advertising opportunities at such media kiosks, and could give rise to new revenue-sharing business models between content providers and advertisers for providing subsidised services.
Ultrafast short-range data transfer applications could potentially be available to consumers within as little as two to three years. The specifications for this technology for chips capable of sending RF signals in the 60 GHz range are expected to be published as an International Standards Organisation (ISO) standard in 2009. Once standardised and commercialised, this multigigabit technology has tremendous promise for new consumer and information technology applications.
For more information contact Patrick Cairns, Frost & Sullivan, +27 (0)21 680 3274, patrick.cairns@frost.com, www.frost.com
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