VIDEO: Is Intel's Digital Baseband the Future of Communication?
9/13/2012 by: Theo Valich
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.
Tags:
Intel, INTC, Pat Gelsinger, EMC, VMware, Justin Rattner, Radio Free Intel, CTO, Intel CTO, Digital 2Radio, Digital Baseband, Baseband, Analog, Analog IC, Digital IC, AIC, DIC, Communication is all Math, Baseband Radio, Baseband Radio Transmission, Radio Transmission
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