A new silicon chip developed at Australia’s Melbourne University (MU) could revolutionize the way household gadgets like televisions, phones and DVD players talk to each other, according to its inventors. The tiny five-millimeter-a-side chip can transmit data through a wireless connection at a breakthrough five gigabits per second over distances of up to 10 meters. An entire high-definition movie from a video shop kiosk could be transmitted to a mobile phone in a few seconds, and the phone could then upload the movie to a home computer or screen at the same speed. The “GiFi” chip was unveiled last week at the National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre, based on the MU campus. “I believe in the longer term every consumer device will have this technology,” said Professor Stan Skafidas, who led an MU team that spent 10 years developing the chip. Short-range wireless technology is a hotly contested area, with research teams around the world racing to be the first to launch such a product. Skafidas says his team is the first to demonstrate a working transceiver-on-a-chip that uses CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology — the cheap, ubiquitous technique that prints silicon chips. According to the university, the milestone puts the MU team “head and shoulders in front of the competition in terms of price and power demand.” The chip uses only a tiny one millimeter-wide antenna and less than two watts of power, and would cost less than $10 to manufacture. It uses the 60GHz “millimeter wave” spectrum to transmit the data, which gives it an advantage over WiFi (wireless internet). WiFi’s part of the spectrum is increasingly crowded, sharing the waves with devices such as cordless phones, which leads to interference and slower speeds. The millimeter wave spectrum (30 to 300 GHz) is almost unoccupied, and the new chip is potentially hundreds of times faster than the average home WiFi unit. However, WiFi still benefits from being able to provide wireless coverage over a greater distance. The chip represents several concurrent breakthroughs; it includes a world-first power amplifier that is only a few microns wide, and it also has world’s first signal mixing and filter technology, as well as a switch that isolates the transmitter and receiver so they do not interfere with each other. Skafidas predicts it will hit the market after about a year of further development. Go to: The Sydney Morning Herald

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