At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner unveiled a pair of technologies coming out of Intel Labs that will overcome many of the size and power limits that have stood in the way of integrating radio technology more tightly with computers and other digital devices. The first, what Intel calls the “Moore’s Law Radio,” is a complete WiFi transceiver on a 32-nanometer scale silicon chip; the second, called Rosepoint, is a complete system-on-a-chip that integrates two Atom processor cores with a digital WiFi transceiver.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner holds a wafer of Rosepoint system-on-a-chip dies. Each die has two Atom cores and a full WiFi transceiver. The prototypes, which Intel is working on turning into products, are the result of a decade of research and development into radio technology launched by former CTO Pat Gelsinger (now CEO of VMware). As part of a strategy called “Radio Free Intel,” Gelsinger set a goal to “literally get to the point where radios are integrated into every product we build.”

The problem has been that while radios have become increasingly digital, many critical components integratedparticularly around radio frequency generationhave remained analog. “Digital has surpassed analog in most areasjust about any area except radio,” Rattner said in his keynote. While the back-end elements of wireless have been digitized long ago, the front endphase modulation, frequency synthesis, and RF power amplification, for examplehave largely been dependent on analog components.

The problem posed by those analog components is that while digital components can be scaled down with improvements in silicon die manufacturing, the analog parts can’tas they get smaller, they get worse, Ratter said. Yorgos Palaskas, the research leader in Intel’s radio integration lab, said that because analog components generally performed much better when manufactured on a larger scale, the analog components for WiFi transceivers and cell phones “are typically made on a separate fab.”

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