Baseband chip expands connectivity to wireless

Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008

High-quality ArticlesRadiospire Networks Inc. has released a wireless data transmission at 1.6Gbit/s using a carrier at 60GHz. The company employed a silicon-germanium millimeter wave radio provided by IBM along with its own AirHook baseband chip.

Radiospire did not identify who used the technology for testing or where it was conducted. It claimed that an uncompressed high-definition video stream was used as its test signal. The company did not mention the exact distance that the signal was transmitted. It was not also clarified whether AirHook is single-chip or multichip solution.

Radiospires AirHook technology is believed to be compatible to many multimedia downloads like mobile phones, wireless docking systems for PCs and wireless gigabit Ethernet. The chipset is radio-spectrum agnostic and viable for any broadband radio channel, such as the unlicensed 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz and 57GHz to 66GHz parts of the spectrum.

The company noted that the AirHook chipset is designed for integration in the cable replacement dongles, HDTVs, DVD players, game consoles and other electronics products. It did not disclose what foundry it is partnering with to produce the chips or what technology is used to manufacture them.

Developing multigigabit wireless connectivity is backed by academic and industry efforts such as the IEEE 802.15.3c standards group, the WirelessHD special interest group and European Carton Makers Association Internationals TC32-TG20 task group.

""With abundant, unlicensed bandwidth and worldwide overlap, the 60GHz spectrum holds significant progress in providing wireless connectivity for increasing high data rate applications,"" said Jim Rogers, analog and mixed-signal product manager, IBM System & Technology Group, in a statement. ""The demonstration with Radiospire shows that coming up with reduced costs and smaller form factor of our silicon-germanium millimeter wave ICs, along with AirHooks spectrum-agnostic baseband processors, were one step closer to making multi-Gbit/s wireless a reality for a host of high-demand business and consumer applications,"" he added.

Source: Eetasia