WiGig is a wireless standard which has been developed with the objective of creating a standard for a LAN (think wi-fi) with real world speeds on the order of gigabits. Today Panasonic has announced they have created the first chip capable of bringing that technology to a mobile platform (for instance an Android phone!). We may have to wait a bit for the chip to make it into actual phones, but when it does, get ready to stream 1080p to your tablet from your desktop to your heart’s content.
Panasonic’s chip brings 60 GHz WiGig together with the normal 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi bands, as well as Bluetooth 4.0, making for some fast data streaming. Until now WiGig has been limited to stationary devices, such as TVs or desktop computers, due to the required power to operate at such a high bandwidth as WiGig does. Panasonic’s new chip has managed to squeeze all this wireless goodness in and only run on one watt.
The only letdown here is that it won’t be blowing up your internet speeds, as that will still be bottlenecked by whatever speed you have from your wireless provider. What this does mean is that streaming to and from other phones, as well as WiGig enabled devices in your home will become, according to Panasonic, as much as twenty times faster. This means streaming, for instance, a video from your phone to a WiGig TV, or syncing your phone wirelessly to your music or video collection stored on a desktop at home would be almost instant. Exciting stuff. Check out the press release below for more details.
OSAKA, Japan–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Panasonic Corporation has successfully developed a 60GHz multi-gigabit wireless communication technology that is optimized for mobile devices, and supports the WiGig [1] specification and/or the IEEE802.11ad [2] draft specification. This multi-gigabit wireless communication technology consists of a 60GHz transceiver and a baseband processor which are integrated individually onto CMOS semiconductor chips through circuit technologies optimized for mobile devices. The technology enables multi-gigabit wireless communication of more than 20 times faster than existing wireless LANs using the 60GHz frequency band, and through the optimization of both the transceiver core and peripheral circuits, it also enables lower than 1W low-power, multi-gigabit wireless communication in the future.
Up till today, only the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands have been used in high-speed wireless communication for mobile devices while 60GHz ultra-high-speed wireless communication remains to be employed only in stationary devices such as TVs, but not in mobile devices due to the higher energy consumption associated with the use of wider frequency bandwidth.
With high-speed communication of 20 times faster than existing wireless LANs, this technology allows the transferring of a 30-minute long compressed high definition (HD) video content within 10 seconds. In combination with the low power features made possible through the transceiver core and peripheral circuits optimization, it has been made viable for mobile devices such as smart phones that requires lower than 1W of power consumption in their radio function unit. This is a big step forward to realize stress-free, fast HD video content transfer and streaming on mobile devices.
The technology has the following features:
1. The world’s lowest noise signal generator (-95dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset frequency) enables high sensitivity wireless performance. The transceiver has been integrated into a CMOS chip, which leads to miniaturization of the mobile devices.
2. Forward error correction (FEC) code is indispensable to maintain reliability in high-speed wireless communication. In this technology, the circuit size of decoding block is 30% smaller than that of Panasonic’s conventional architectures by optimizing decoding circuits. This reduction results in lower power consumption.
3. The chipset supports the WiGig specification, which is going to be an industry standard for a multi-gigabit, short range wireless communication system. It will provide reliable interoperability among various devices.
The technology consists of the following new Panasonic’s technologies:
1. A unique multiband voltage controlled oscillator technology, which achieves excellent phase noise while covering over 9GHz frequency bandwidth required by the WiGig specifications.
2. A FEC decoding circuit technology, which enables the use of common functional units to handle various error correction codes specified in the WiGig and at the same time, achieves low power by reducing the circuit complexity and the operation frequency.
On this development, Panasonic holds 16 domestic patents and 16 overseas patents, including pending applications.
This development will be presented at ICC 2011 (International Conference on Communications 2011) to be held at the Kyoto International Conference Hall, Japan from June 5 to 9, 2011.
This new technology was partly supported by “The research and development project for expansion of radio spectrum resources” of The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
*Based on Panasonic data as of June 2, 2011
[1] Wireless Gigabit Alliance was established by technology leaders within the consumer electronics, personal computer, semiconductor and handheld industries to address the need for faster, wireless connectivity between computing, communications and entertainment devices. Panasonic has been a board member of WiGig Alliance.
[2] The IEEE802.11 is a Working Group that defines a set of standards for Wireless Local Area Network. The Task Group IEEE802.11ad has developed a draft standard specification for next generation high speed communication of above 1Gbps in the 60GHz frequency band.
Thats hawt.