After a decade of research, Intel shows off its digital radio chip
Justin Rattner demonstrated Intel's first all-digital WiFi radio chip after more than a decade of research. That radio is the stepping stone for microprocessors — from the smallest sensor chips to supercomputers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This demo closes a five-year arc inside Intel: the company pitched putting the Internet in your pocket as far back as 2007, then showed 2012-ready smartphone and tablet designs last December. The all-digital WiFi radio that Justin Rattner demonstrated after more than a decade of research is the piece that lets Intel build connectivity itself rather than pair its processors with someone else's analog RF silicon.
It also rides the same process-scaling push behind Intel's 3-D transistor work — shrinking and digitizing functions that analog design once handled separately. The story traveled unusually wide for a research demo, picked up same-day by The Register, PC World, HEXUS and multiple ZDNet desks, which signals how much weight readers put on Intel's post-PC ambitions.
First-order effects
- Intel can now build a WiFi radio entirely in its standard logic process, removing the separate analog RF manufacturing step that previously forced radios off Intel's own fabs.
- Per Rattner's confirmed framing, the radio is positioned as a stepping stone across Intel's whole microprocessor range — from the smallest sensor chips to supercomputers — making connectivity an internal roadmap item rather than a third-party component.
Second-order effects
- Vendors of standalone WiFi silicon gain a competitor whose radio shares a process node with the processor itself, threatening the two-chip bill of materials that device builders currently assemble around Intel parts.
- Makers evaluating Intel's smartphone and tablet designs for 2012 face one fewer external component if the radio lands on-die, tightening Intel's control over the full reference design.
Third-order effects
- If digital radios scale down to sensor-class chips, every processor becomes a potential network endpoint, extending Intel's addressable base past PCs and phones into embedded and sensing hardware.
- Value in radio design shifts toward owners of leading-edge logic fabs like Intel and away from analog RF specialists, since connectivity becomes a byproduct of digital process leadership.
The trend: Connectivity is collapsing into the processor itself, as digital radios let leading-edge logic manufacturers ship wireless capability as a feature of compute silicon rather than a separately sourced part.