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"GiFi" — Short-Range, 5-Gbps Wireless For $10/Chip
mickq writes "The Age reports that Melbourne scientists have built and demonstrated tiny CMOS chips, 5 mm per side, that can transmit 5 Gbps over short distances — about 10 m. The chip features a tiny 1-mm antenna, a power amp that is only a few microns wide, and power consumption of only 2 W. 'GiFi' appears set to revolutionize short-distance data transmission, and transmits in the relatively uncrowded 60GHz range. Best of all, the chip is only about a year away from public release, and will only cost around US $9.20 to produce."
I took out a patent for an electronic device that sends signals and has the number 10 in it! Those bloody Aussies stole my idea! I'll see you in Texas court!
So WUSB is going to be made redundant before it even becomes mainstream?
How do you pronounce Gi-Fi? "guy-fie"? "giffy"? "jiffy"?
If you use the proprietary GiFi protocol you may end up getting into patent trouble.
We should create our own standard which does what we need and is not covered by existing patents.
I suggest we call this protocol PnGi.
liqbase
I believe BlueTooth's max transmission rate is 2.1 Mb/sec (for BlueTooth 2.0). 5 Gb/sec > 2.1 Mb/sec.
USB 1.1 adapters are pretty cheap, too...how much are they being used today?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
And this is different from these others... how exactly?
http://www.vubiq.com/news.php
http://gigaom.com/2008/02/20/60-ghz60-second-hd-movie-downloads/
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/RF/ogre_project/
I would hope that this drops the price of wireless routers from what they are now, about US$60? The only drawback I could see is how the signal is transmitted through materials, as I live in a three story townhouse and I have a room in the furnished basement. I have a Wireless-G router that I have had no trouble with but from the article it says it is for short distances /= 10m with a 60GHz frequency. I would assume this is a high enough frequency to penetrate most household materials including any cement or cinderblocks. I'm all for it since most routers today just create a lot of noise and/or interference and confuse the laptop I have for some reason.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Wow, do we ever abuse these words.
:-P
From "Hi-Fi" (High Fidelity) to "Wi-Fi" (Wireless, but the Fi sounds cool and people vaguely know what you mean) to "GiFi" as gigabit wireless, you've basically lost the actual underlying words.
It almost seems like the whole "Fi" part is now just generally meaning "technology thingy".
So, is a baker PieFi? A politician LieFi? Someone, please, stop the madness.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This thing does so much, that if anything can get me a date, this chip can.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Yeah but blutooth is only a couple of mbps and in practice seems to be much more susceptible to interference. The few times I've tried to use it for large data transfers have been pretty slow. Its just easier to grab a usb cable.
Right now there's a sort of race to come up with a bluetooth replacement. UWB, wireless USB, etc are the things this product wants to compete with.
"Best of all, the chip is only about a year away from public release, and will only cost around US $9.20 to produce"
To translate: This is vaporware, it may never be released in our lifetime, it may never actually work, and I have no fricken clue as to what it will actually cost.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
...and will cost $500 to get in your grubby paws. That is until the amazing powers of supply and demand take effect and the price drops over an unjustifiable period of time. The demand for 5G wireless will be huge...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
There's already a gay internet cafe near my house called Guy-Fi, and I think they're gonna be pissed.
Not a bad idea. But I wonder how much at 10 m is affected by walls. I also wonder how much it's affected by interference from cordless phones and other wireless devices. Usually when they say the range is 10m, the actual usable distance is half that, and only when there's no walls.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I don't think so.
The dimensions that are discussed are unrealistic when considering heat dissipation let alone power conduction at that scale.
Further, it is a far cry from ideal lab results to real world conditions with the myriad of problems facing super high frequency technology!
I smell a rain dance - a promotional announcement to attract financial angels.
Ed
Typically, these types of networks measure power consumption in mW, not W.
Walls? Forget about it. This is 60GHz your talking about. Good luck getting it out of the case you put the chip in let alone through a wall, your body, or too much oxygen.
Short for "GirlFriend"? Ok, I was joking there but I'm still wondering what in the hell the "fi" is for. WiFi the Wi is "wide" and GiFi the Gi is obviously "gigabit". The old "HiFi" stood for "high fidelity".
WTF does "Fi" stand for in WiFi and GiFi?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you're giving it away to your coffee shop customers then being stopped by walls could be a good thing.
True, but all USB 1.1 gizmos are backwards compatible with USB 2.0, and this is hardly backwards compatible with Bluetooth.
In this case you have a totally different standard that appears to be competing not so much in the PAN area but in the wireless-USB area, and in that respect I see it competing with UWB and WUSB. However, WUSB is only 480 Mbits per second...
That said, at the moment, WUSB seems to be a solution looking for a problem; which leads back to my original issue. Where is this going to come in handy at this price point? Nobody's going to pay upwards of $35 for a glorified USB cable.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
It consumes two watts of power. It is not a Bluetooth replacement. Using my phone for comparison: 1100mAh 3.7 V 3.7V / 2W = 1.85 A 1.1 Ah / 1.85 A = 0.59 Hours = approx. 36 Minutes. I know it won't be transmitting the whole time, but essentially this will be useless in a mobile application.
That said, what else would it really replace or be used in?
Short-range wireless video transmission, for one. From your IPTV box to your TV(s).
Case in point: at home, we just ditched cable and DSL and switched to an optic fibre triple-play (internet/IP TV/telephone) offer, which is much cheaper. For technical reasons the main receiver box can only be located near our entrance door, while the TV sits at the other side of the house.
Out of three possible solutions, none work well:
-laying an ethernet cable in the ceiling is possible, but a headache
-IP over the power lines is unreliable
-WiFi, regardless of the flavor, doesn't provide enough bandwidth (keep in mind that the box streams several HDTV channels at once, for instance when recording one while watching another)
So in our case, the proposed chip and protocol sounds ideal. 10m doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more than enough to cover most apartments / houses, and I expect it will be possible to get signal at much greater distances, with degraded signal. 2.5Gbps over 20m, wirelessly, would rock.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
At this data rate, this appears to be not so much competing with the keyboard/mouse/printer USB connector than it does the DVI video connector. Now all we need is some of Tesla's magic to transmit the electricity wirelessly and we're home free.
E pluribus unum
So if local coffee shops offer internet access with one of these, they can advertise that they have wireless G-spots!
/* No Comment */
While they are the first ones out of the gate with an all-in-one CMOS solution, I doubt they will be the only ones. Look for Intel to have something available later this year (with the marketing power to make it successful). What we need now is someone like Sony or Toshiba to jump on board so that TVs (er, should I say monitors now) and audio receivers are integrated as well.
I mean WOW... $10 for something that has the transceiver and antenna on ONE single CMOS chip is awesome. Prior technologies required so silicon and multiple chips, etc. This will be huge!
Set-top-boxes will be the LAST ones to get involved. This is unfortunate since they are essentially what 90% of the population will be looking for (cable, satellite, IPTV).
I've seen a lot of responses whether this will be a replacement for blue-tooth or USB. Well, it's not really in the same category, so NO, it won't be either of those. USB is wired, bluetooth is not, but GiFi could really be so much more (I really hate the term GiFi and prefer "WirelessHD"). In that respect (see http://www.wirelesshd.org/), it should really be thought of as an ad-hoc wireless network... not a TCP/IP network, but one dedicated to the coordination of media transmitters and receivers. At least that is my hope, because if it gets shoe-horned into something that already exists like WiFi, or bluetooth it will be a total waste of energy.
programming myself into obsolescence
Think of a [slightly] different market...
Most home theatres have a common issue. Rats nest of cables for the various components. RCA/HDCP/HDMI/Optical/etc. to connect a myriad of components - XBoxn, Wii, Playstationn, receiver, amplifier, DVR, speakers x7, television, htpc, remote control. If you could increase the cost of each of these devices by $10 to eliminate the requirement for cables... you could simplify the installation procedures and improve the "ease of use" factor. Take it out of the box, and press the "join my GiFi network" button. The new DVR shows up on your receiver as device 5 "Stanasonic DVR SNxxxx". The new centre channel speaker shows up as device 23 "Blose Centre Channel speaker SNxxxx". The projector shows up as device 1 "Blite-On Projector SNxxxx". It would be interesting to see if devices that don't require the complete bandwidth available would use less power - ie: speakers wouldn't utilize that bandwidth....
The average home office would benefit from the same technology. Anything that will fit comfortably within a 900 sq ft or smaller room - printer, spouse's computer, kid's computer, scanner, mouse, keyboard.
Perhaps there would be a seperate market for "secure GiFi" - that would involve buying or creating a 256bit encryption key on a small USB token - that would need to be attached to any new devices that you wish to join your SGiFi network.
At the end of the day, for $10 per device, there's a lot of simplicity to be gained here.
It's basic RF. The higher the frequency, the worse the penetration. 700MHz and 900MHz go through just about everything (except dirt and metal). 2.4GHz (802.11b/g) can go through wood panels, drywall, and some forms of metal (not many). I don't know what the mathematical description is for the ratio of frequency vs rates of absorption/penetration, but it gets pretty bad at about 5.8GHz (802.11a). I can't imagine what it is at 60GHz and only 2W of output power.
Linky
"Indoor wave propagation is also affected by the building material. The density of the materials used in the construction of a building determines the number of walls the RF signal can pass through and still maintain adequate coverage. Paper and vinyl walls have little effect on signal penetration. Solid walls, solid floors and pre-cast concrete walls can limit signal penetration to one or two walls without degrading coverage. This can vary widely based any steel reinforcing within the concrete. Concrete and concrete block walls can limit signal penetration to three or four walls. Wood or drywall typically allows for adequate penetration of five or six walls. A thick metal wall causes signals to reflect off, which results in poor penetration. Steel reinforced concrete flooring restricts coverage between floors to perhaps one or two floors.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength is. Shorter wavelengths have more probability to get absorbed and distorted by a building material. Therefore, 802.11a, which operates in a higher frequency band, is more prone to the building material effect."
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -Anon.
This is one of the dumbest replies I have ever seen.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Little problem with your math there. I=P/V, not V/P.
3.7V * 1.1Ah = 4Wh. If that were just powering the chip, thats 2 hours, not 1/2 hour.
Now a pessimistic guess that a 5Gbps link will actually get something like 500Mbps of data throughput, thats 62MB/s. At that speed it will take about a minute and a half to copy a DVD image. 2W*1.5s=50mWh, or roughly 1% of the phone's battery life. Seems like it would be perfect for use on a mobile phone.
This is all assuming their claims as relayed by the media are accurate.
... who cares?
This isn't a wifi replacement -at all-. This is a wireless USB replacement and then some.
At 5Gbps you'd have enough throughput to put a hypothetical smartphone on your desk, and not only use your desktop monitor/keyboard/mouse for comfort, but to be able to use your desktop's processor and ram to accelerate the apps that still basically 'live' on your phone.
So imagine a setting where work data is coming off the network, personal settings and user data are coming off your phone, and desktop workstations are glorified accelerator appliances with more comfortable input interfaces that can be swapped out, time-shared, simultaneously-shared, etc. Neat, huh? Any desk would be functionally equivalent and not being at your desk would just mean less convenient peripherals and slower processing.
That level of throughput is also overkill for wireless video from a portable to a headmounted display -- or even a more mundane wireless HDMI replacement for your TV, game console, BDR, DVD, Tivo, etc. Say good bye to that tangle of wires and video switches! There's also killer peer-to-peer networking capabilities you could build onto portables. (low-power, high-speed peer-to-peer internet for social apps, gaming and data sharing? yes please!)
If, in real world use, it could only go 3m at half that throughput and couldn't penetrate through so much as rice paper, it's -still- an incredibly exciting technology that could facilitate a staggering array of apps.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
I've been working on a totally wireless monitor for years, and I've almost got the solution - details here.
To make it the most efficient, I use a directed beam of energy. I also pre-convert that energy to photons before sending it, so that the monitor won't have to waste energy doing the conversion. I also pre-modulate the signal spatially so that I only send the energy needed -- again, another win for efficiency.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
You're kidding, right? Stick one of these in your laptop, then have one that's a dongle (at first) that you can plug into a USB 2(+) port. Instant FAST wireless. Then these will start getting built into things like digital cameras, monitors, etc. Bluetooth is way too slow for any decent digital camera. USB is a pain in many cases. Personally I use a Firewire card reader, and frequently wish it would go faster. 5 Gbps? Yes please. Will I pay $30 for it? Or $50? Definitely. Not that the price won't come down when the things are in everything.