NICTA confident of cashing in on 60GHz WLAN bonanza

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 07 April 2010 14:34

IT Industry - Market

A market research firm is tipping a market of two million 60GHz short range wireless chipsets by 2015. Meanwhile NICTA is still confident of commercialising its 60GHz technology and says the market will be much bigger.

60GHz technology provides data throughputs at up to 5Gbps over short ranges. It is widely seen as being necessary to network devices in the home that will require throughputs beyond the hundreds of megabits per second offered by "Wireless-N", 802.11n, the latest iteration of the WiFi standard, in order to carry HDTV signals and to enable the transfer of large files, such as video from mobile to other devices.

Australia's NICTA has been pioneering CMOS based 60GHz chipsets for several years. It unveiled the technology in February 2008, announcing plans to spin off the technology in a separate company, and demonstrated its first prototypes in February 2009.

That spin-off has yet to happen, and project leader Stan Skafidas said, in August 2009, that it was proving difficult to get the estimated $10m needed from the venture capital market to make this happen.

NICTA now has a team in the US under Pat Kelly pursuing its search for venture funding and he told iTWire he was confident that this would be achieved and that NICTA's technology would be successful against competing 60GHz technologies that appear to have gained a head start.

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