Intel Chefs Bake WiFi Into Mobile Chips

Researchers at Intel have come up with a way to make WiFi faster and more energy efficient. It’s a chip called Rosepoint, and although it’s just a research project today, it could show up in mobile phones and laptop computers by the middle of the decade.

Rosepoint represents a breakthrough that Intel engineers have been hammering away at for years. They’ve been able to digitize little blocks of radio components in the past — things like amplifiers and synthesizers — but now they’ve managed to put a digital 2.4 GHz WiFi radio on a chip, right next to one of their low-power Atom central processing units (CPUs).

Building analog WiFi chips is a bit of an art. Radio Frequency (RF) chip designers build complex, customized circuits that operate on a continuum of voltages. The problem is that it’s often tough to shrink these analog designs down to the tiny scale that’s possible with today’s cutting-edge chipmaking processes.