Intel to pay $1.4B for Infineon's wireless biz, says it will continue support for ARM-based customers

Intel's at it again! They're paying $1.4B for Infineon's wireless business. We've seen this movie before, though this time the business is a firmly established vendor and Intel appears to be willing to be "hands-off" for at least a little while. Both points bode well for Intel, who has struggled to digest previous wireless and wireline acquisitions and make them both profitable AND a part of the Intel brand.

It is clear that Intel (and AMD, for that matter) NEED to expand beyond the PC processor market if they are going to continue to grow. Let's face it: the world is becoming more mobile. There are MORE processors out there than ever before, but a very small percentage of them are incorporated into TRADITIONAL computing platforms. THAT's where the growth, revenue and profit are, if you can just make the fastest, most power-miserly, properly featured "brain".

Good luck and godspeed, Intel. You're gonna need it!

Continua's Wireless Standards Choice

The Continua Health Alliance has chosen both a Zigbee and a Bluetooth wireless protocol for compliant devices. Standards make sense for devices that need to be interoperable, and in this case, the lack of efficiency for any given device or application can be justified by this. However, by choosing such a path, Continua may end up down the road with NO home for their compliant products, as several non-standards based solutions are either released, sampling, or coming to market in the near future. In the interim, let the race begin! Untethered medical sensors and systems have been sorely needed, as anyone who has had an EKG can tell you, for a long time....

WOW! 2 More WiMax Handsets!!!

According to a recent article in EE Times At least two more WiMax handsets coming in 2010 there will be a few more handsets joining the WiMax fray, but in an age of iPad and iTouch, will any of them gain any traction?

The supposed play for these devices is video communications and streaming, which, to me, seems like a very tiny niche given that we need 4 radios to get the job done via WiMax vs only one very inexpensive radio to do the same thing (with much lower latency, by the way) via WiFi.

I guess there will ALWAYS be the guy that needs to show off his new toy, but are WiMax handsets the GlobalStar/Iridium handset for the 2010s?

Will WiMAX Make It?

A new insight from ABI indicates that the big wireless modem players are starting to offer WiMAX products for the portable standard. It still may take internal modems for WiMAX to really take off, but this should be seen as a positive step.

I'm STILL VERY skeptical of a WiMAX windfall, and it has been a VERY LONG TIME COMING, but from these recent updates, it looks like there is a home for this standard.

Yet Another MicroTransceiver

According to EE Times, Silicon Labs has recently joined the fray in the battle for "ubiquitous sensoring".


You can't control what you can't measure, and from the looks of it, we want to control EVERYTHING! The trick is to do so without power or wires, so the push is to develop very low power microcontrollers with RF "peripherals".

The other piece of this puzzle is also yet unsolved and, IMHO, will be extremely fractious: the protocol. Every application requires a different latency, datarate, accuracy, distance, network topology, etc... and so there is not a "one size fits all" solution. Each application (or group of apps) will have to have its own optimized solution so that power can be scavenged and system requirements can be met.

Sorry Zigbee, Bluetooth LE, etc.... Your efforts to be the be-all, end-all solution will be the very thing that limits, if not obliterates, your market share.

"Welcome to the party, SiLabs!"