Intel makes microchips, not radios. But if the company's newest manufacturing plans pan out, the distinction between the two products may disappear. According to chief technology officer Patrick Gelsinger, Intel is quickly learning how to build tiny radio transceivers from the same material it uses in microchips: silicon. Research progress inspired Gelsinger to announce in February an audacious plan to put a silicon-based radio on the corner of every microchip the company sells, within as little as five years, at no extra cost to customers.

The announcement puts Intel at the forefront of industry efforts to build all-in-one chips that could replace the jumble of costly parts in cell phones and other wireless gadgets. Silicon integrated circuits already dominate when it comes to the digital "back end" of cell phones and other wireless communications devices, where signals are decoded for conversion into sound. But the analog "front-end" components, which capture and amplify radio signals and convert them to digital bits, are typically found on a separate, radio frequency section of the wireless circuit board. This section houses both large, three-dimensional parts such as capacitors and oscillators and transistorized components like amplifiers, which run at such high speeds that they have traditionally been made only using faster, more expensive "compound semiconductors" like gallium arsenide.

But Intel and other chip makers would prefer to stick all these functions onto a single silicon chip, which could be patterned using well-established photolithographic techniques and would cost about one-tenth as much as chips using compound semiconductors. For engineers and computer scientists looking to a future where computing power is ubiquitous and wireless, the potential cost and space savings of putting all of a radio's parts onto the same chip that holds the computing components has a powerful appeal. "We can safely say that any intelligent device needs both a processor and some form of wireless connectivity," says Turner Whitted, manager of the Hardware Devices Research group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. "It makes sense to combine these functions to the greatest extent possible."

There are still big technical barriers to mass-producing silicon radios, such as reducing three-dimensional parts to the micrometer scale with the needed precision and uniformity. But Gelsinger made his announcement on the strength of recent work in the labs of Steve Pawlowski, director of Intel Labs' Communications and Interconnect Technology Group in Portland, OR, and Valluri Rao, who heads the company's Analytical and Microsystems Technologies division. Rao's staff is using silicon to build tiny structures that duplicate the functions of traditional capacitors, oscillators and other components. Pawlowski and his colleagues, meanwhile, are testing silicon circuitry that performs the amplifying, mixing and filtering functions typically handled by separate, more expensive front-end chips. By working out these core technologies, "We're going to be able to dramatically reduce the size and cost of the components required in radio circuits," Gelsinger says.