WiFi, Bluetooth and FM on one Broadcom chip
Broadcom has put Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an FM radio on a single 65nm CMOS chip. Which changes the world of mobile phones for a small cost in a big way. This is a major step towards converged phone services and strengthens the argument that eventually we only carry one electronic device — the mobile cellphone.
At the moment I carry two plus an MP3 player which is damn silly.
This is not totally fresh news in a sense for it has been done, sort of, before. Marvell announced Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on a chip last year but that was much larger using a fair amount of power.
The new Broadcom’s BMC4325 (which is the successor to the BCM2048 seen above: how do they think of such romantic names?) is smaller and uses less power.
Ask any mobile phone user what they want the most? Batteries that last days rather than hours.
Take it as a given that his chip will rapidly become both a standard and a benchmark that other chip makers have to exceed. Stuart Carlaw, wireless research director at ABI Research, put it a little more formally: ‘Integrating multiple wireless technologies onto a single chip will be welcomed by mobile device manufacturers due to the inherent cost, space and power savings it will enable.’
There was a major snag in making this work. What you have, in effect, are multiple radios in one chip which can, if you will excuse the expression, interfere with each other. Wi-Fi b/g and Bluetooth both operate in the 2.4GHz range.
Broadcom believes it has cracked this through what it calls InConcert algorithms (excellent name there, lads) that run the two in tandem, either with separate antennas, or sharing an antenna to save space.
The most important part is that power demands are 40 percent less than on competing chips and everything still works at the same strength. Dammit, the FM radio is wider ranging than the one I have by my Bangkok hotel bed — it supports both US and European standards.
How far can this sort of thing go? In truth, there is no limit. The mobile phone will become, I am now fairly certain, the total electronics device we have all been waiting for.
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