Panasonic has developed a new WiGig radio chip that uses less than 1 watt of power, making it the most power-efficient WiGig radio chip in the world. The new chip is intended to be used in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, hence the extremely low power requirements.

Prior to the development of this chip, WiGig was considered only practical for stationary devices due to higher power requirements to work on the 60GHz band. Panasonic boasts that commercial usage of WiGig on mobile devices is now possible, allowing for speeds beyond 5Gbps over wireless local area networks to actually be practical. It also states that WiGig transmissions can be used to transfer thirty minutes of high definition video in ten seconds, which is fantastic for wireless streaming of HD movies from a tablet or a smartphone to a television.

Even with this chip, there’s still the problem of range. At 60GHz, the range of a clear wireless signal is very low (maybe half the range of Bluetooth at best) unless a very powerful antenna structure is used. The reason is that 60GHz signals weaken a lot from attenuation with molecules in the air, such as oxygen. Solving that problem (or at least reducing the effect of that problem) will go a long way toward making WiGig useful for mobile devices. However, WiGig is already being used in places like data centers where high speed, short range data transmissions work very well.

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