Letting Wi-Fi Do More With Less Energy

(page 2 of 2)

The company's Wi-Fi "system on a chip" (SoC) hosts the processor and networking protocols, completely eliminating the need for an external 32-bit processor. While that means G2's products aren't suited for such high-end mobile devices as smartphones, they allow product manufacturers to bring Wi-Fi to devices that require longer battery life more than advanced processing power.

As Payne noted; "The minute you add Wi-Fi, people start worrying about power consumption." G2's products aim to bring Wi-Fi to where it's useful without burdening devices with power-hungry processors. While G2's Wi-Fi-enabled products aren't capable of handling the high throughput necessary for big data, such as streaming video, they do support audio and simple data transmission. "I can't give you a perfect picture of where our technology fits," Payne said. That's not, however, because there it lacks a market, but because potential applications are so numerous and diverse.

As Wi-Fi becomes increasingly ubiquitous, the market for such chips will only grow. Investors are taking note. ZeroG Wireless, a Cisco-backed startup contending in this area, is set to announce today that it has closed a $17 million Series B round of financing from Battery Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Greylock Partners. ZeroG previously raised a $13 million Series A round in June 2007. GainSpan—which was spun out of Intel in 2006 and offers SoC products with embedded Flash memory—closed a $20 million Series B round last December.

G2 showed off a Wi-Fi-enabled remote with Philips Electronics at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. Payne said that other uses for low-power, low-bandwidth Wi-Fi include applications in health care (such as Wi-Fi-enabled scales to automatically share health data with doctors) and building management (Wi-Fi-equipped sensors to detect the temperature and to initiate heating or cooling responses wirelessly). Such low-power chips could also make Internet-enabled appliances targeting energy efficiency (BusinessWeek.com, 9/24/08) a reality. GainSpan is particularly interested in this market: Earlier this year, the company announced an energy-monitoring partnership with Hitachi.

G2's all-in-one approach is enough to convince some consumer device manufacturers to make the switch—even when they're not battery dependent. Payne says one of G2's clients is swapping out an efficient Atheros Wi-Fi chip for a G2 chip, although its product plugs into the wall. While Payne wouldn't disclose exactly how the chip will be used, she referred in her description to in-home electronic displays for Internet-connected data such as news and weather. "They didn't need the processing power," she said of the client.

While a "use-only-what-you-need" philosophy may not help our smartphones just yet, it's an efficiency lesson that could come in handy for the rest of our Wi-Fi-wired lives.

Provided by GigaOm—