Wireless networks in their current form can’t support efforts by service providers trying to deliver video inside the home. That’s according to Joe Del Rio, a senior marketing manager at Broadcom with whom I chatted yesterday; he said service providers are still inclined to trust wired networking standards such as Home PNA or MoCA to deliver video and entertainment content around the home. Carriers are asking for between 30 Mbps and 36 Mbps, he said — enough to deliver three uncompressed HD video streams to televisions. Continue »

Qualcomm's mirasol MEMS

Qualcomm today announced the opening of a factory to make its mirasol displays, and a Wi-Fi chip designed for home networking — both efforts to keep the company a top chipmaker even as carriers migrate from the CDMA technology that provides so much of its profits. CDMA royalties aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, but Qualcomm needs to find new markets for its chips that don’t ride the 3G wireless gravy train. Hence, its push into mobile television with MediaFLO, the creation of its Gobi platform, displays and now, home networking. Continue »

Wireless networking gets all the love in today’s mobile world, but inside the home, wires will still play a key role in delivering entertainment and other content. Your set-top box may sport an Ethernet port, but it still connects to the wall via coaxial cable. Wires are a secure, fast, cheap and existing network inside most homes. The main links around the home are power lines, coaxial cable, copper phone wires or some mix of the three, depending on where in the world a person lives. But the three standards vying for dominance today could gradually give ground to an emerging standard for delivering IP-based services called G.hn. Continue »

A group of big-name technology companies including Intel, Dell, Broadcom and Marvell have joined together to promote a new wireless standard that could deliver between 1 gigabit per second to 6 Gbps inside the home. Chipmaking startup Wilocity is also part of the effort.

The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance plans to use the 60 GHz spectrum, already in use for other types of high-data-rate wireless transmissions, for a variety of functions such as replacing the HDMI cable between a TV and a computer. Other options include delivering wireless gaming and home storage networking. The specification for the standard should be set by the end of this year, and devices containing the chips could be sold as early as 2010. Continue »

Qualcomm and Broadcom, two of the primary communications chip firms, agreed today to end their long-standing intellectual property feud, with Qualcomm agreeing to pay out $891 million to Broadcom over four years. Qualcomm, which owns the intellectual property related to the CDMA 3G wireless standard, has been defending itself from patent infringement claims made by Broadcom, a key provider of silicon for Wi-Fi, GPS and Ethernet.

Under the terms of the settlement, Qualcomm will pay Broadcom $891 million in cash over a period of four years, of which $200 million will be paid in the quarter ending June 30 of this year. The agreement does not provide for any other scheduled payments between the parties.

It also appears that Broadcom won’t sue Qualcomm’s customers on the cellular side, and Qualcomm won’t sue Broadcom’s customers in the non-cellular world. This is relevant because, in 2007, Verizon ended up agreeing to pay a royalty fee to Broadcom after the International Trade Commission determined that Qualcomm chips used in Verizon phones violated Broadcom’s intellectual property. Under the terms of this deal it looks like Verizon Wireless, as a cellular company, could have avoided paying a double royalty to both chip firms.

Broadcom made an unsolicited bid of $764 million for Fibre Channel chipmaker Emulex this morning, a deal that offers a 40 percent premium over Emulex’s share price at Monday’s market close. Broadcom, which is an industry leader in Ethernet chips that help connect servers inside the data center, is now trying to get its hands on the chips that hook the computers to the storage network. This move is in line with those made by gear makers Cisco and Juniper, which are pushing for a more prominent role for networking in the data center. Continue »

Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips. It’s one of a handful of integration deals Broadcom has inked with software vendors to port their content to its chips. As broadband reaches more devices, deals between chipmakers and software vendors like these are becoming increasingly important.

For anyone who recalls the Chumby as a countertop device for accessing widgets, you’re thinking of the right company. It’s merely joining a growing pack of those looking expand its efforts beyond hardware to become a platform. In January it signed a similar integration deal with Marvell to get its widget platform onto digital picture frames.

Such heightened integration efforts are a natural outgrowth of adding broadband to phones, TVs, set-top boxes or even picture frames, because when you add broadband, you add the Internet. And as the mobile world has shown, no one wants a bastardized version of a “mobile web” or a “TV web;” they want the real deal. So that means the chips powering these devices need to be smarter, and have the right software to deliver a web-like experience on a screen that doesn’t belong to the PC. Continue »