Intel is one of the best chip manufacturing companies in the world. Their investment in Research and Development and manufacturing is perhaps rivaled only by IBM. Intel is looking to leverage this manufacturing output by turning their attention to producing low cost digital Radio Frequency (RF) chips.

Intel will be announcing at a technical conference in San Francisco this week the progress they have made in designing new versions of key radio components that are typically built using analog technology and different materials than the silicon used to create most digital chips. 

These traditional analog electrical components used in circuit design include power amplifiers, transmitters, modulators and other “radio frequency” devices. These are the building blocks of circuits designed by electrical engineers who specialize in RF technologies for chip designs.

RF technologies essentially enable the transmission of data and information through wireless networks. Think of an RF circuit as a device that is capable of transmitting very small amounts of electricity (voltages) by pushing them through a broadcast antenna at certain frequencies across air (via airwaves or frequencies) to a receiving device (antenna) where it induces a small current in a circuit.  The signal is then translated back into a string of binary information. 

This pre and post transmission process includes both digital to analog and analog to digital conversions to complete the transmission. This type of conversion is typically known as digital signal processing and can be conducted very fast with the assistance of microprocessors.

Intel in targeting this entire RF circuitry manufacturing process with new chipset designs.

“We are getting close to having the complete kit of digital RF building blocks for these radios,” says Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer.

Moore's Law, or the pace of transistor miniaturization that Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first described in 1965 keeps bringing us more inexpensive and useful microprocessors and memory chips and devices like laptop computers and iPhones through advancements in manufacturing and chip design.

 If RF circuitry can be produced in the same chip factories with the same declining cost per function, then radios used to send data over networks like 4G or Wi-Fi will be much less expensive and ubiquitous, Rattner argues.

According to the WSJ, if RF components can be placed alongside other components on a chip then Intel can save space and energy and cost in products like smartphones. 

One of Intel’s papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference describes such a creation, a chip that has a Wi-Fi transceiver and two Intel Atom processor cores on the same piece of silicon.

Devices called “system on a chip,” or SoCs, already are commonplace in cellphones. Many of them include a key communications device called a baseband processor alongside a conventional processor that runs application software on the device.

But the RF components that actually modulate and amplify radio waves are usually kept separate, in part because their signals can interfere with operations on other parts of the chip, Rattner says. 

Mitigating that interference was a key part of the Intel effort, he adds, requiring collaboration from engineers in its research, development and manufacturing groups to come up with the right approach.

The results give Intel “great confidence” that it will be able to come up with true single-chip products with RF components for phones, tablet computers and other devices where size and power consumption are paramount, says Rattner, while conceding that such developments are at least several years away.

These advancements will ultimately allow Intel to compete more directly with mobile chip designers and manufacturers such as ARM.