IDF Fall 2003: Intel backs the renaissance of radio

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 19 Sep 2003 at 09:17

'Before I retire I want Intel technology to touch every person in the world every minute of every day.' This was the startling statement from the closing IDF keynote of Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer.

Gelsinger had been talking about Intel's drive to make wireless networking ubiquitous by integrating radios into every processor it shipped.

'Over the next decade, the majority of the world will communicate wirelessly,' he said. 'Intel is accelerating the convergence of computing and communication by bringing the benefits of lower cost, scalability and faster-pace-of-innovation to radio technology.'

'As a result,' he went on, 'wireless communication will become truly ubiquitous and transparent to the user, making a flexible, high-capacity, standards-based wireless infrastructure even more crucial.'

Fiber networks were okay, he conceded, if you needed more bandwidth than wireless could support, but he wanted to leave copper infrastructure behind.

'We are making tremendous progress,' he said 'in siliconising radios.' And he highlighted Intel's work with digital CMOS saying the company was 'eliminating the analogue and moving ever more of the radio processing logic into the digital domain', harnessing the power of digital CMOS technology.

'This is what the renaissance of the radio is all about,' he concluded.

It wasn't all radio, however. An interesting part of the keynote involved Gelsinger's use of a 'Universal Communicator' - but note, that this is a concept platform, so don't expect the commercial release of a smartphone from Intel just yet. Featuring the Bulverde XScale processor, as you would expect, it seamlessly switched between WLAN and GSM and GPRS networks, and supported the use of location-based services.

Gelsinger also highlighted new techniques for maximizing the throughput of wireless comms. This involved MIMO (multiple in, multiple out) antenna systems. As the acronym suggests, multiple antennas are used for data transmission and reception. While the mathematic of processing greater complexities of frequency have been known, the computational processing power is now available to make it feasible.

Intel will be pushing for the inclusion of MIMO in future wireless standards. 'Our goal,' said Gelsinger, 'is to drive MIMO into every product we build.'