Intel has few peers when it comes to driving digital technology. Now the Silicon Valley giant believes it has penetrated one of the last bastions where another approach still prevails: radio.
The company is using a technical conference in San Francisco this week to disclose progress in designing new versions of key radio components that are typically built using analog technology and different materials than the silicon used to create most digital chips. It’s referring to things like power amplifiers, transmitters, modulators and other “radio frequency” components, often collectively described by the initials RF.
“We are getting close to having the complete kit of digital RF building blocks for these radios,” says Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer.
Why should we care? It all comes back to Moore’s Law, the technology tenet Intel rides for all its worth.
The relentless pace of transistor miniaturization that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first described in 1965 keeps bringing us more inexpensive and useful microprocessors and memory chips, not to mention devices like laptop computers and iPhones. If RF circuitry can be produced in the same chip factories–with the same ever-declining cost per function–radios used to send data over networks like 4G or Wi-Fi can be much less expensive and ubiquitous, Rattner argues.
(Source : The Wall Street Journal Blog)
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