Faster transmission speeds, low power usage, and significant range are the trifecta of results that all wireless standard companies are chasing with a vengeance. The WirelessHD consortium released the final version of its own standard back in early January, while the startup company Pulse~LINK debuted its own next-generation wireless chipset back in December. The new WirelessHD specification defines a device that operates in the 60GHz spectrum and is capable of transferring up to 4Gbps over 10 meters, while Pulse~LINK claims its new chipset its chipset can deliver up to 890Mbps at close range (8 feet/2.4M) and 120Mbps at 40 feet/12M). If a team from Australia's NICTA (National ICT Australia) is accurately representing their own advancements, however, both these standards are about to be exceeded. The group from NICTA, lead by Gigabit Wireless Project team leader Prof. Stan Skafidas, is claiming to have developed a CMOS-based chip capable of transferring up to 5Gbps at up to 10M—a 25 percent improvement over the WirelessHD specification.

That's a substantial achievement in and of itself, but NICTA's new "GiFi" transmitter is supposedly loaded with a host of other goodies. GiFi is small, at just 5mm per-side (25mm sq.), it's built using CMOS, uses a 1mm antenna, costs less than $10, uses a built-in power amplifier that's only a few microns wide, and draws around 2W of power. That much power consumption means we'll not be seeing GiFi in any mobile devices anytime soon—not unless NICTA can cut the chip's power draw by an order of magnitude—but the rest of the claims made for the nascent standard paint it as the ultimate solution for high-speed, close-range wireless networking. Professor Stafidas, at least, seems to think this is likely. He claims to have spent over a decade designing GiFi, and states that he believes the chip will one day be found "in every consumer device."

According to Stafidas, NICTA will spin out a startup corporation later this year to market and commercialize the design. He estimates that his team needs about a year (and $10 million) to finish R&D and begin production of GiFi transmitters. NICTA is working with the IEEE to ensure GiFi meets standard specifications as defined by IEEE 802.15.3c, and plans to have prototype GiFi's built by the end of the year.

If GiFi seems a little too good to you, you aren't alone. NICTA is essentially claiming to have leapfrogged the competition, and is representing its product as the only real solution for this type of transmission moving forward. That's enough to raise anyone's skepticism level, and the optimistic cost projections and time-to-market estimates don't help much. It's possible that NICTA has actually made fundamental advancements that will speed deployment of short-range, ultra-high-speed networks—but it seems more likely that the organization has drunk a bit too much of its own Kool-Aid.

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