VIDEO: Is Intel's Digital Baseband the Future of Communication?

A decade ago, Patrick "Pat" Gelsinger served as the CTO of Intel and gave engineers a target to create "Radio Free Intel", building a digital radio which would be 'free'. Today, Justin Rattner, old-new CTO of Intel took a stab at Pat for running a software company (Pat is the CEO of VMware) - but also made his challenge a reality.

Justin was joined on stage by Yorgos Palaskas, researcher at Intel Labs. Yorgos explained the invention of the new mathematics which was required in order to make digital radio a reality. Researchers went beyond the basics, and reinvented the base mathematics that makes digital radio a possibility.


Meet Rosepoint: Intel's Experimental 32nm SoC with Digital Radio Transceiver

The digital baseband radio supports the WiFi protocol. In the future, Intel is planning to support communication standards such as 4G LTE with a single Digital Frequency Synthesizer and Digital Phase Modulator - a challenge which was deemed impossible. However, a decade in development and the creation of new mathematical model created a possible digital world, where a single SoC can be created of digital elements, reducing the size of package which as we all know - cannot scale due to the nature of analog circuits.


World, meet Intel Rosepoint. Rosepoint says: 0100100001100101011011000110110001101111001000000101011101 101111011100100110110001100100

Running the message home, and probably making a lot of waves among its competitors, Intel demonstrated Rosepoint test chip. As the name goes, this is a proof of concept processor which combines the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Digital Radio. It was manufactured in 32nm process, and is capable of booting an operating system.

We have recorded a video of Digital Radio in action, and you can see this telling video here:



No doubt about it, this just might be the key news story of the IDF 2012. Time will tell how aggressively will Intel drive this technology... will it become a success like the Centrino, or a dire failure like the WiMAX. Intel, that answer lies solely on you.