It's not often these days that a piece of silicon can deliver the WOW! factor and, before 12 months are out, we might be seeing it again.
The first DRAM, the first EPROM, the first flash memory, the first microprocessor, the early programmable logic chips, these all had the WOW! factor. CMOS programmable logic was probably the last new silicon idea with the WOW! factor, and that happened 30 years ago.
But how about a single piece of silicon that can be successively a GSM radio, a WiMAX radio, an NFC radio, a UWB radio, a WiFi radio, a Bluetooth radio and then go back to being a GSM radio? Now that piece of silicon would have the WOW! factor.
The baseband side of this is already done and dusted by firms such as picoChip, Icera, Sandbridge and NXP.
The RF side is being attacked by US firms such as BitWare, AsicAhead, and TechnoConcepts.
When the RF is cracked, the world is changed. "You'll plug it to one of our chips and it'll do any standard, any frequency, any air interface", says picoChip v-p Rupert Baines, who reckons it's twelve months away.
Instead of having six or seven chips inside a handset, each delivering a discrete radio, you'll have one chip which can deliver seven radios.
That has enormous implications for convergence and for cost. Every portable product will be able to have as many different radios as it wants for the same cost and size as one radio.
If that's not worth a WOW! I don't know what is.
TOMORROW: THE TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL COMPANIES IN SEMICONDUCTORS
Subscribe to this blog's feed