Texas Instruments Breakthrough: 5 Radios Combined Onto One Chip

[dgstorm]

While companies like NVIDIA are getting all the glory building super-fast quad-core monster chips like the Tegra 3 to run the primary tasks of our phones, it's sometimes very easy to overlook that companies like Texas Instruments (TI) are toiling away at several different technologies at once. Today, TI announced a new combo chip that may not sound as exciting as a powerful CPU or GPU, but is nonetheless still as important and ground-breaking. This new chip from TI combines 5 different radios into one die, and it does it all in a smaller and cheaper design than anything else out there.

Texas Instrument's new Five-radio WiLink 8.0 chip utilizes current 45 nanometer technology to smash Wi-Fi, GNSS, NFC, Bluetooth and FM radio onto a single die. Furthermore, this new design achieves a "45 percent reduction in chip real estate, a 60 percent cost reduction and a 30 percent power saving compared with traditional multi-chip offerings." Of course, all of this translates into more features for less money, which eventually makes things better and cheaper for the consumer.

For astute hardware enthusiasts, the best part of this achievement is integrating the NFC chip in a smaller cheaper package. This will eventually mean that all phones, even the low-end to mid-range devices, will have easy access to the Near Field Communications technology. You can check out a few more details at the source link below.

Thanks to our tipster, Str8Aro!

Source: EETimes

 

[yann2]

Amazing achievement. That many functions and all in one chip.

Power savings alone would make it a big improvement. Thumbs up, well done, TI.