Qualcomm has acquired Wilocity to improve Wi-Fi speeds

Qualcomm confirmed on Wednesday that it is buying gigabit wireless specialist Wilocity in a move that puts the mobile chipmaker firmly behind the new WiGig standard. At some point next year, we will start seeing the first WiGig chipsets in smartphones and other mobile devices, said Tal Tamir, former CEO of Wilocity and now VP of product management for Qualcomm’s Atheros division. The deal closed this morning, but Qualcomm did not reveal a purchase price for the Israeli company, though earlier reports stated the parties were negotiating in the $300 million range. The deal is big boost for the WiGig IEEE 802.11ad standard, which is now under of the Wi-Fi umbrella. Unlike Wi-Fi, WiGig is intended to be a much more close-range technology similar to Bluetooth. But unlike Bluetooth, WiGig will support multigigabit transfer speeds by tapping into a broad range of frequencies in the 60 GHz bands.

Qualcomm on Wednesday announced it bought startup chipmaker Wilocity to help it provide a speedier, but shorter-distance flavor of wireless technology in more devices. Wilocity, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and founded in 2007, develops chips using a newer type of Wi-Fi called WiGig that runs on a relatively high radio frequency, at 60 gigahertz. WiGig, an industrywide standard backed by the Wi-Fi Alliance industry group, offers speeds several times faster than traditional Wi-Fi, but is only effective at short distances, so could work well within a single room. Because of its speedy connection, WiGig is seen as a potential replacement for physical cables still necessary to connect devices such as tablets or PCs to large displays or televisions. In stating its goal to eliminate cables from all PCs by 2016, Intel pointed to WiGig as one of the potential answers. Qualcomm likewise recognizes its importance. “We and our partners believe in this technology strongly,” Qualcomm executive Cormac Conroy told CNET in an interview Wednesday. “We think it’s important to the industry.” The company declined to disclose financial details of the deal. The capabilities of Wilocity’s chips make them useful for heavy-lifting functions that can take place in a small area, such as streaming 4K video from a smartphone to a television with minimal lag, or wirelessly docking a tablet to a large display, keyboard, and mouse. It wouldn’t be useful for transferring the video across a house or large office, like you’re able to with a traditional Wi-Fi network, which boasts a longer range, but much lower speeds.