Rosepoint Intel Atom with integrated WiFi

When a giant like Intel enters a new market segment does so with the full weight of its know-how and therefore with the utmost seriousness, especially if the segment is particularly successful, as in the case of tablets and smartphones. In this week that San Francisco is being ISSCC (IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference), the Santa Clara company will present the results achieved with what is currently only a prototype, but it could become in effect a mass-produced by the middle of this decade, then around 2015.

It's called Rosepoint and is a chip that Intel has managed to integrate a dual core Atom processor and a 32-nm RF module for wireless WiFi. How we manage to integrate processors, chips, controllers and modules into a single die reduces power consumption, as some of the modern System on a chip or APU from AMD. It is therefore a necessary evolution for the increasingly predominant mobile world, which must be able to contain the lowest possible consumption in order to provide increasingly higher performance, combined with a good battery life.

Integrate a WiFi module presented several technical challenges. It was necessary to limit the mutual interference between the module and the processor, since both operate in the same frequency. Rosepoint solves this problem through the integration of technologies for noise suppression and protection from radio interference. But the news of the prototype finsicono here. Justin Rattner, Intel Chief Technology Officer, explained that the integrated RF chip is digital and not analog. These are indeed very difficult to achieve, have a complex architecture and function with continuous voltages. Rimpicciolirli then to integrate them into future chips that will take more and more miniaturized lithographic processes, would be very difficult.

The digital chips instead are much simpler, working with only two voltage levels and can be shrunk as desired, so they are easier to integrate on the same die of a processor. The result, ultimately, lead chipmaker Intel in competition with other modules that make WiFi as Broadcomm, Texas Instruments and many others, but the goal of Intel is mainly to provide a better processor for tablets and smartphones of the future. Again this is a great move, but there is still wonder if Intel is still behind schedule.