Radio Free Intel
Henry Norr
Monday, March 4, 2002
Just weeks after Radio Free Afghanistan went on the air,
chipmaker Intel last week disclosed plans for Radio Free
Intel.
No, it's not a new vehicle for delivering propaganda to or
from the Santa Clara chipmaker -- the phrase itself is "just
a play on words," according to a company spokesman.
But the initiative it denotes is a big bet for the company,
and if successful it could have a major impact on the way
we live and work.
As described by Pat Gelsinger, the company's newly
anointed chief technical officer, in the closing keynote at
last week's Intel Developers Forum, Radio Free Intel is a
new plan to begin building into the company's chips
"silicon radios" for wireless networking.
And not just some of its chips, but all of them -- every last
processor and other product the company builds.
Starting from research it funded at several universities,
Intel thinks it has figured out a way to make complete
radios, including amplifiers, antennas and all other
necessary components, out of the same kind of silicon it
now uses to make Pentiums.
If so -- and Gelsinger acknowledged it's not a 100-percent
certainty yet -- such radios could be fully integrated into
Intel chips in as little as five years. "We want to get to the
point where the radio is nothing more than the corner of
the die," he said.
In case the all-silicon vision doesn't work out, there's a
back-up plan that's almost as neat: assemble the radio
out of futuristic minimachines -- MEMS, or
micro-electro-mechanical systems -- on a silicon
substrate, then build that device into a common ceramic
package with a conventional silicon chip.
Either way, these radios would be capable of three
different kinds of wireless networking, instantly switching
frequencies and protocols to handle each as needed:
-- PAN (personal-area networking), the industry term for
connecting devices about your person or around your
desk -- linking a handheld organizer or digital camera to a
mobile phone, say, or a PC to a printer or portable music
player.
That's a role played now mostly by wired USB
connections, and one Bluetooth hopes to take over. But
by the time integrated radios are ready, Gelsinger
suggested, the wireless technology of choice for such
applications could be a promising new type of wireless
known as ultra-wideband, which received initial,
limited approval from the Federal Communications
Commission just last month.
-- LAN (local-area networking), for connecting PCs
around the office or home to each other and thence to the
Internet. In this area several wireless technologies have
jockeyed for position in recent years, but one called Wi-Fi,
or 802.11, has emerged as the clear winner, and
throughout last week's conference Intel officials endorsed
it with enthusiasm.
Specifically, they are promoting dual-band 802.11 radios,
which would implement both the current 802.11b
standard and 802.11a, a much faster alternative that's just
now appearing in products.
(In fact, even before it can deliver integrated silicon
radios, Intel hopes to persuade PC-makers to build
dual-mode 802.11 radios into every PC, not just
notebooks but eventually also desktop models, beginning
next year.)
-- WAN (wide-area networking), or connecting to the
Internet with no wired connection at all. At this level,
Gelsinger said, Intel's radios will be designed to
communicate with the cellular networks, which by then
will presumably have advanced to full 3G, if not 4G,
technologies.
In Gelsinger's vision, all these connections would be
always on, and they would be automatically updated as
you roam from place to place.
If Intel succeeds in building radios that occupy just a
corner of a chip, the incremental cost of adding this whole
range of communications capabilities to digital devices
will be nearly nil -- that's where the "free" comes in.
That means not only computers and peripherals, but also
consumer electronics gear -- TVs, stereos and all the rest.
And beyond those devices, Gelsinger suggested some
exotic new applications for the technology -- baby
blankets that monitor an infant's breathing and
temperature and automatically send an alert in case of
any abnormality; motors that report when they are
wearing out; swimming pools that announce when
something has fallen in; even "smart farms" where
sensors wirelessly report on the growth and nutrition
needs of each plant.
Technology aside, such scenarios raise a host of social
issues -- about security, privacy, spectrum management
(will every product with a chip need FCC approval?), and,
by no means least, health (who knows what effect this
jumble of new radio signals might have).
Gelsinger and his colleagues admit they don't have
answers to these questions. But if the technology moves
as quickly as they predict, we as a society are going to
have to confront them in a hurry.
AI
