WiGig has not been featured in a lot of headlines lately, but that does not mean the nascent technology has gone on hiatus. In fact, chipmaker Wilocity announced that it has already shipped 1 million WiGig units in the first year of production, and the market is just ramping up.
The Wilocity units have been incorporated into certain premium Dell Ultrabooks and high-performance Dell mobile workstations as well as the D5000 Wireless Dock, which offers connectivity to displays, projectors, networks, speakers and other peripherals.
Source: Dell
WiGig, based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard, operates in the 60 GHz band. Wilocity WiGig chips also include 802.11a/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. In addition to being part of a tri-band networking solution, WiGig is targeted for wireless storage and edge caching as well as wireless docking.
"We believe WiGig in conjunction with legacy Wi-Fi offers our customers a trifecta of speed, bandwidth, and connectivity," said Kirk Schell, vice president of Dell's commercial PC group. He added that Dell expects to add the technology to more platforms this year.
According to a recent study from IHS, much of the impending growth expected in the high-speed wireless industry will stem from the growing use of WiGig and multi-stream Wi-Fi in mobile and home entertainment applications. The firm forecast that shipments of high-speed wireless integrated circuits (ICs) will hit 1.7 billion in 2018, and that 537 million wireless modules will ship that year, 60 percent of which will be multi-stream Wi-Fi modules.
"We see WiGig technology ready to really take off in 2014 and 2015," said Stephanie Gibbons, IHS senior analyst for connectivity.
"The 802.11ad specification is complete, and product certification is about to begin. At the same time, demand for faster wireless performance and better connectivity in smartphones, TVs, and mobile PCs will drive market adoption," she added.
For more:
- see this Wilocity release
- see this Dell blog post
- see this Engineering TV video
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