Atheros and Wilocity Announce Tri-band Partnership

Posted 07/14/2010 at 12:32pm | by Michael Brown

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Wilocity and Atheros Communications today announced a partnership to build tri-band wireless solutions that will operate on the 2.4-, 5.0,- and 60GHz frequency bands. Wilocity has been developing 60GHz technology for three years. Atheros is a major player in the dual-band IEEE 802.11n chipset market.

Both companies have seats on the WiGig Alliance’s board of directors and contributed to the draft standard for wireless networking using the 60GHz frequency band the alliance announced on May 10. The alliance is also contributing ideas to the IEEE Task Group AD, which is working on the IEEE 802.11ad but it’s not taking any chances that the standards body will move quickly enough to enable standardized 60GHz products to reach retail shelves on a timely basis.

WiGig products will be theoretically capable of massive data throughput of 7Gb/s, but the high-frequency signals have difficulty penetrating walls and other barriers. Wilocity and Atheros plan to offer chipsets that use the 2.4- and 5.0GHz frequency bands for transferring data from room to room, and the 60GHz band for ultra-fast data transfers within a room for applications such as streaming high-definition video to a television or video projector, or transferring very large files from one device to another.

“We believe 60GHz will augment Wi-Fi,” said Wilocity CEO and co-founder, Tal Tamir. “Homes will have islands of 7Gb/s of throughput.”

“If you look at the bigger trends driving wireless connectivity,” added Gary, General Manager of Atheros’ Computing and Consumer Business Unit, “you see a proliferation of digital content, both in terms of numbers and sheer file size. We used to discriminate as to the information we wanted to keep, and we’d keep the file sizes down. But now, with digital SLRs, mobile phones, and digital video, file sizes are exploding. And the connected home is finally taking shape, after many years of talking about it. All that couples with the need for backup.”

Although early chipsets will utilize discrete 802.11n parts from Atheros, and WiGig components from Wilocity, retail products—which Szilagyi expects will begin coming to market in early 2011—will appear to the consumer as a single solution.