Put on your engineering caps, it’s time for acronyms. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has announced that they’re entering trial stages for a new large-scale integration chip which will meet next generation Long Term Evolution standards using Multiple Input/Multiple Output technologies to achieve target speeds.
“What the hell did he just say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well crap, we better nod, or he’ll think we’re dumb.”
“Right.”
*nods all around*
Let’s take a look at some of the technologies involved here.
LSI: Large-Scale Integration
According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia:
…Further development, driven by the same economic factors, led to “Large-Scale Integration” (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip. Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.
In Plain English:
More transistors = handling more electrical signals = faster data flow.
MIMO: Multiple-Input/Multiple Output
According to He With All Answers Googleable:
In radio, multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO (pronounced mee-moh or my-moh), is the use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance. It is one of several forms of smart antenna technology.
In Plain English:
More antennae = more information coming and going = faster data flow.
LTE: Long-Term Evolution
According to The Fount of All Editable Knowledge:
(Long Term Evolution) is the name given to a project within the Third Generation Partnership Project to improve the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future technology evolutions. Goals include improving spectral efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum and refarmed spectrum opportunities, and better integration with other open standards.
In Plain English:
Rules for carriers = networks upgraded = faster data flow.
This new chip should be able to hit 100 Mbps on mobile phones (quite the jump from current 7.2 Mbps on HSPA) while gobbling up a scant 0.04 W of power, which is impressive, but previous tests using MIMO had DoCoMo running upwards 250 MBps. They’ve been talking about getting this thing rolling since at least the last CTIA, so so maybe we’ll see some more working examples at CES…
For the more technically-minded, be sure to hit up the press release below for the real nitty-gritty.
[via DoCoMo]