Take a Dip, Rosepoint

Let's put "Rosepoint, Chips, Bake, Radio Frequency, Low-power, 2.4Ghz" in one sentence.  

Weird? Not really.

It's Wired's dip for a state of the art power efficiency, high speed digital radio frequency chips.

Ok. I  got excited I plunged into the pool of adjectives to describe it and got drowned. Read on while I am resuscitated...

"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 chip-making processes.

Not so with digital RF chips, such as the one Intel’s just built. Digital RF chips are simpler. They have just two voltage levels and can be shrunk down much more easily whenever Intel’s researchers come up with a way to make chip parts smaller.

That’s good news for WiFi users. When Intel’s chips start to hit the market they will have “state of the art power efficiency” and superior signal quality, says Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner. And things will only get better as Intel shrinks things down. “With a digital approach to radio, you can bring the benefits of Moore’s law to RF and radio circuits,” he says.