( Central News Agency, Taipei )

A team at National Taiwan University (NTU) has developed a new type of system on a chip (SoC) for ultra-high speed wireless communication that can transmit digital data 100 times faster than wireless fidelity (WiFi) devices, researchers at the university said yesterday. Jri Lee , an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and project leader, said that when operating at the optimal transmission rate of 5 gigabytes per second, the SoC takes less than 10 seconds to transfer a 4 gigabyte movie file.

It would take 90 minutes to transfer the same file on an ADSL network, 120 minutes on a WiFi system and more than four hours with Bluetooth.

The researchers said that although the radio-frequency front-end circuit, baseband modulating circuit and transceiver unit are all part of the SoC architecture, the design is still the best among existing communication SoCs in terms of compactness, energy consumption and production cost.

Lee said that the 0.5mm2 SoC !X about one-tenth the size of existing chipsets !X can be produced at less than US$1 per unit, or about one-tenth the cost of models already on the market.

This is an indication of the market potential once the device enters mass production, he said.