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Gelsinger tunes into last year's radio programming at IDF

Nostalgia ruled when Intel's chief technology officer took the podium at the IDF. He seemed to have tuned into the speech he made at Munich IDF last year, or maybe the year before - reporting on the events at Radio Free Intel.

And the message, if you missed it, is that Intel will built a universal soft radio on the corner of every chip it builds.

The novelty came when Eric Mentzer, Intel vice president and CTO of the Intel Communications Group, discussed Intel's plans to accelerate the deployment of broadband wireless infrastructure worldwide. He also talked about Intel driving high-speed WLAN standards like 802.11n, and "last mile" wireless 802.16a, one of the "metropolitan area network" Wireless MAN technologies - WiMax.

Mentzer also revealed the worst-kept secret of Intel wireless: "Future wireless networking products for the Intel(R) Centrino(TM) mobile technology platform include an 802.11b/g wireless networking component that will be in production before the end of 2003, and an 802.11a/b/g wireless networking component that will be in production in the first half of 2004."

And Gelsinger did claim some success with the experiments to create this new ecosphere.

"Over the next decade, the majority of the world will communicate wirelessly," Gelsinger 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, wireless communication will become truly ubiquitous and transparent to the user, making a flexible, high-capacity, standards-based wireless infrastructure even more crucial."

What this means, effectively, is that Intel believes nobody else will bother building radios. "Intel believes that in the future ubiquitous, wireless communication will be enabled through the deployment of industry standards and will be powered by Intel silicon and technology building blocks," summarised a spokesthing, later. "Gelsinger indicated Intel is fuelling the 'renaissance of radios' by making significant progress to develop silicon radios using industry-leading low-cost, scalable manufacturing process technology.

The success claims is in developing core radio components using its 0.18-micron digital CMOS process, including the world's fastest voltage controlled oscillator (a radio component that determine the frequency at which signals are transmitted and received) in CMOS operating at speeds greater than 75 GHz.

By building these and other analog radio components with a digital manufacturing process, Intel aims to lower the cost of adding wireless capabilities to future products, he said.

While silicon radios are at the heart of the Radio Free Intel strategy, Intel is also developing a radio platform that will adapt to its environment and its user.

Intel executives spoke of having "achieved success toward the development of an adaptive radio platform" and claimed the company has "created key innovations in the areas of channel estimation, adaptive modulation techniques and smart antennas to optimise the throughput, range, power and ultimately, the performance of wireless communication."

Intel is also talking up its "significant role in the development of 802.11n," a next-generation WLAN technology with significantly higher throughput. The new WLAN standard would enable approximately three times the performance of current 802.11 solutions, allowing users to transfer more data wirelessly in a set period of time.

In addition, the company is researching adaptive communication technologies for future devices that communicate with each other transparently while also adapting to the dynamic needs of the user. Gelsinger said that this new class of mobile devices, called "universal communicators," will transparently and seamlessly connect to multiple networks and services.

He demonstrated seamless roaming across WLAN and WWAN networks using a universal communicator prototype developed by Intel researchers.

In his keynote address, Mentzer explained how wireless technology is an important element of Intel's corporate focus on the convergence of computing and communications. Intel's wireless product plans for 2004 will further advance broadband wireless technology.

Intel's efforts to develop silicon based on the IEEE 802.16a* standard will provide a broadband wireless access alternative to existing "last mile" methods such as cable and digital subscriber lines (DSL). The IEEE 802.16a standard is a wireless broadband access technology that links Wi-Fi hotspots and provides broadband wireless connectivity to businesses and homes.

"It is expected that networks based on the 802.16a standard will have a range up to 30 miles and the ability to transfer data, voice and video at speeds of up to 70 Megabits-per-second (Mbps)," Mentzer said.

He said that Intel has signed agreements with leading OEMs in broadband wireless access equipment to deliver low-cost WiMAX-certified equipment based on Intel 802.16a silicon in the second half of 2004.