Samsung’ acquisition of connectivity chip firm CSR last week intensified the competition among vendors specializing in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS ‘ and ‘combo chips’ integrating them all together. Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Marvell have been big players in these combo products, which have targeted the low power and low space constraints of handsets. However, Broadcom sees new markets opening up for them, in home media equipment, as all the gadgets in the home become interconnected. New applications will be welcome, given that the competition is increasing too, with Atheros now part of Qualcomm and CSR heading to Samsung.
The key battle for this year will be getting the two new fast Wi-Fi variants into products. The 802.11ac standard, in 5GHz, is finding its way into gateways, enterprise gear and is on the brink of handsets. Its stablemate, 802.11ad, which runs in 60GHz spectrum, is a year or two further from the mass market, and will mainly be targeted at ultrafast HD media transfer in homes. However, even at this early stage, the big suppliers are looking over the shoulders of the start-ups which pioneered 60GHz, as seen in a new partnership between Marvell and specialist Wilocity.
Wilocity will combine its 60GHz chips with Marvell’s Wi-Fi silicon to create modules. The company has a similar agreement with Qualcomm Atheros using 802.11n chips on mini-PCI Express cards from the larger firm.
Two other start-ups, Beam Networks and Peraso Technologies, plan to unveil their own 11ad 60GHz chips in the first quarter of 2013, indicating a growing momentum behind the standard, also known as WiGig.
Wilocity sees the first target applications as wireless docking and connections to external peripherals like hard drives. Then it will proceed into access points, and in all these segments Marvell is a strong partner. Media equipment will follow later but will require additional ecosystem partners from the consumer electronics world. The initial focus of 60GHz projects, by pioneers like SiBeam, was heavily on HD video but currently the low hanging fruit seems to lie in speeding up PC-peripheral interconnect ‘ a pattern once seen in the aborted UltraWideBand effort.
Mark Grodzinsky, VP of marketing at Wilocity, told EETimes: ‘The easiest way to get 60GHz to market is going into the docking station because the PC maker can bundle the dock,’ Grodzinsky said. ‘Users won’t spend more money on a high performance wireless upgrade if there is nothing to connect to.’
The chips could drive data rates as fast as 4.6Gbps at 2.5W, said Grodzinsky, a big leap from 11n’s 450Mbps peak and 11ac’s 1Gbps. At the sub-watt rates needed for smartphones, 60GHz promises rates up to 2.3Gbps, compared to 150Mbps for single-stream 11n and 433Mbps for 11ac. Grodzinsky added that costs of the 60GHz solutions are similar to those when the 11n generation began, before it reached high volume.
The shift in emphasis in WiGig from video to PCs has been partly driven by Intel’s increased interest levels. Intel has shown signs that it aims to drive WiGig a way it has not steered Wi-Fi since the early days of 802.11b, when the chip giant – though not the first to support the fledgling WLan standard – certainly conceived the role it now has in anywhere broadband, and helped define the market with its Centrino platform. Intel may well want to make a similar impact in next generation HD video-class communications, harnessing 802.11ad ‘ not just to gain chip sales but to retain the kind of overall influence over industry direction which is vital to a company of this scale.
In particular, Intel seems to be trying to tie 11ad tightly to its ultrabook reference platform, its superslim notebook design with which it aims to set up an alternative constituency to that of the tablet or the Apple MacBook Air, with familiar Intel channels and ecosystem. One of its tactics for Ultrabook is to integrate various functions, which are normally add-ons or are implemented separately from the main silicon, in order to make them standard and enhance the appeal of the product. For instance, it has incorporated NFC in a way that will enable simpler online payments too, and is likely to draw on its acquisitions to deliver on-chip security and advanced virtualization in future.
WiGig is also going to be an integral aspect of Ultrabook, since it can compensate for the lack of ports in these thin, increasingly web-oriented devices by supporting far wider functionality over wireless connections and the cloud. It is noticeable that ARM and MIPS are not members of the WiGig Alliance (though some licensees like Marvell, Broadcom and others are) ‘ and that the chairman of the Alliance’s board, Dr Ali Sadri, is also director of Intel’s Mobile Wireless Group.
Sadri told ITProPortal that the success of WiGig actually relies on that of the ultrabook form factor. He expects WiGig to enable OEMs finally to eliminate most wired connections, which will remove the disadvantage that Ultrabooks and the MacBook Air do not generally have Ethernet ports or many I/Os because of physical constraints. Sadri expects WiGig products, including Ultrabooks, to hit the market next year and be mainstream by early 2014.
So, despite its obvious application to consumer electronics, 11ad has been most noisily supported in public by the PC community. Intel and key start-ups like SiBeam andWilocity (itself an Intel spin-out) have led the way, hoping short range, ultra-high speed wireless connections will stimulate PC upgrades and help adapt the PC form factor to new patterns of behavior such as always-on cloud services. In February, the WiGig Alliance called for greater developer involvement in the creation of the world’s first unified specification for multi-gigabit wireless docking, also supporting connection to displays between PCs, consumer electronics and handheld devices.
WiGig has also maximized its flexibility by publishing a ‘WiGig Bus Extension’, which defines an adaption layer for running PCI Express on top of WiGig. There will be a similar adaption layer for USB (called WiGig Serial Extension) to bring the main fast peripheral interconnect technologies into the game. This will be a major step forward in improving the PC’s connections to the broader device platform, and doing away with some of its physical ports, and therefore its bulk. In 60GHz, the main alternative to WiGig is WirelessHD, which is based on innovations from SiBeam (now part of Silicon Image), and the 802.16.3 standard. However, it has far more limited reach than 802.11, despite initial interest from TV majors like Sony, and is likely to seek convergence in future – even SiBeam itself has developed a dual-mode platform supporting both standards.