Back in the early days of Bluetooth, which, believe it or not, were about ten years ago, I heard from BT proponents that Wi-Fi in handsets would never go anywhere because the chipsets involved consumed too much real estate, cost too much, and, most of all, consumed too much power. All of these were, of course, absolutely valid points – at the time. But the conclusion was false because (a) BT proponents of course wanted to sell BT chips (and sell, sell, sell they did) and didn’t mind knocking a non-competitor (again, at the time) to do it, and (b) they ignored the faster/better/cheaper of VLSI and indeed all of high tech that they themselves depended upon and would ultimately benefit from on an essentially continuous basis. But, then, so would Wi-Fi. And that’s the part they forgot or otherwise chose to ignore. My counterargument was, well, you can guess. The BT community was unhappy with me.
Which brings us to now, and a case in point: the brand new AR6002 WLAN single-chip Wi-Fi component from Atheros. Atheros Communications has been building great Wi-Fi chips for a long time now, but have lived a bit in the shadow of Intel’s Centrino and with significant competition from Broadcom and Marvell (among others) regardless. Their early MIMO products were no where near as good as those from Airgo Networks, now part of Qualcomm. And yet, Atheros is a scrappy competitor that has regardless played a more than leading role in making Wi-Fi the practically ubiquitous entity that it is today. I’ve been known to swap Intel mini-PCIs out of some (but not all) of my notebooks and replace them with Atheros cards. Such is not an activity for the squeamish, but I digress.
So – just consider what the 6002 does. The previous version of the Atheros single-chip solution, the 6001, consumed 400 mW while transmitting at about 15 Mbps. The 6002, by comparison, consumes only 137 mW while transmitting at 22 Mbps. That’s about a third of the power previously required, while delivering about 30% better performance. Standby power is basically zero. The only downside is that a larger (and external) power amp chip might be required in some applications, but that was the case with the 6001 as well. No matter; the barriers to embedded Wi-Fi becoming universal continue to fall. Power might in fact be the last frontier, and we are closer than ever now to this challenge falling and Wi-Fi becoming universal.
Price, performance, and power are critical to the future of WLANs, because the market for Wi-Fi embedded in small devices is gigantic, dwarfing the more common applications in APs and PC clients – although any application today can of course benefit from lower power consumption regardless. But, just for example, I’ve predicted that half of all cell phones sold in 2011 – worldwide – will have embedded Wi-Fi, most of these being 1×1 .11n. But that’s half a billion units, with power consumption perhaps being the big differentiator among chipset offerings. No one has an embedded .11n chipset at this point, but don’t be surprised if you see such sooner rather than later.
Atheros has always been a leader in wireless LANs, from the first .11a radio built entirely out of CMOS to mainstream .11a/g products that offer superior performance to the amazing power profile of the 6002. Just another example of innovation in wireless continuing at an amazing level, solving incredibly difficult problems, and of how bright the future of Wi-Fi truly is.
