While the emancipatory effect of wireless technology is obvious, Gelsinger's vision rested on two radical underpinnings. The first was that the proposed wireless connectivity would essentially be free. The second was that Intel would be providing it. In vanilla CMOS.

That's right. A 35-year-old PC-oriented processor company with no radio-frequency expertise was going to usurp RF behemoths like Philips, Motorola, Analog Devices, STMicroelectronics, Intersil's wireless-LAN division (now a part of GlobespanVirata) and Broadcom, as well as specialists such as Atheros, Bermai, IceFyre and XtremeSpectrum.

Some have speculated that Gelsinger was still high on the March launch of Intel's Centrino WLAN platform. At $300 million, Centrino rode the second largest PR blitz in the company's history, after the Pentium, with the desired effect of stimulating the Wi-Fi market. According to a recent report from In-Stat/MDR, Intel's aggressive push of Centrino on the client side is one of two major forces transforming the Wi-Fi business this year. The other, In-Stat said, is the emergence of wireless switching on the infrastructure side.

The report said that 16 million notebook PCs will ship to businesses this year with Wi-Fi embedded, and that by 2005, Wi-Fi will be included in 95 percent of notebooks as a standard feature. As a result, the extra cost of Wi-Fi will be essentially transparent to the end user, the market researchers concluded.

Ironically, Centrino doesn't actually contain any Intel RF expertise per se: The radio comes from Philips and the baseband from Symbol Technologies. But that doesn't bother Gelsinger, who claims ownership of all aspects of Centrino.

"We own the product-which means we brought an awful lot of the RF expertise to make it a product, even though many of the core technologies come externally," Gelsinger told EE Times.

Besides, the CTO is confident that the work currently under way at Intel Labs' R&D division in Hillsboro, Ore., will substantiate his RF-in-CMOS predictions over the coming years, despite industry skepticism-primarily from RF incumbents-that borders on hysteria.

From advanced research in agile RF and software-defined radios with smart antennas; from wideband power amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters to advanced packaging and the elimination of substrate coupling within system-on-chip designs, Gelsinger outlined how the building blocks were being put in place to realize the vision of what the company calls "Radio Free Intel." The name, of course, plays off the cold war-era Radio Free Europe, launched in 1950 to beam broadcasts from the West into communist countries.

From the researchers' point of view, their day of vindication came with the presentation of an all-digital-CMOS 10-GHz agile-RF frequency synthesizer at the 2003 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Kyoto, Japan, in early June. The phase noise in this device, which is based on a 5-GHz CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), was specified as -120 dBc at a 1-MHz offset. "That's when the world stood up and took notice," said Steve Pawlowski, an Intel Fellow who leads the Hillsboro R&D group along with Kevin Kahn, communications and interconnect labs director.

As to when the wireless R&D will reach the product stage, Pawlowski said, "All I can say is that I'm actively working with our wireless-LAN product group to try to get the lab technology into the product road map. It's an ongoing process. Even today, if my own people asked me when could we have that technology in product, I don't have a definite date." He hopes the WLAN products will arrive soon, followed by "the holy grail of reconfigurable radio in the 2006-2007 time frame."

Coincident with that eureka moment was the steady progression of Moore's Law. "Things we didn't really think about in the past suddenly became tractable by Moore's Law," said Gelsinger. At one time, "If I was doing a 5-GHz radio with a 500-MHz CMOS process, that was next to impossible. Now I have a 5-GHz CMOS process." Moore's Law also provided the multiple gigaflops of processing power to enable such functions as software-defined radios with reconfigurable architectures and smart antennas, and the clout to do RF processing in CMOS.

At that time the wireless effort "was about giving some guys some resources-and not telling them they couldn't be successful," Gelsinger said. The caveat was that anything they came up with had to be compatible with Intel's digital CMOS process. No exceptions.

The team was led by Pawlowski and Kahn, both of whom came from within Intel's computing group, of which Gelsinger was then CTO. As a result, wireless talent had to be recruited, which became a bigger issue than anticipated. That issue came to the fore in 2000 when, according to Gelsinger, Intel made a corporatewide shift in strategy as it realized that "this convergence thing was for real, and that we were going to make a big business out of wireless communications."

True to its word, the company formed the Wireless Communications and Computing Group in 2000 and since then has snatched up wireless companies such as Xircom and, late in 2002, the remnants of Iospan Wireless. It also invested in digital signal processing specialist 3DSP and partnered with Analog Devices Inc. to develop what ADI calls the BlackFin and Intel the Micro Signal Architecture (MSA).

The spring kickoff of the Centrino campaign was preceded by an announcement that Intel Capital would disperse $150 million to Wi-Fi companies developing enabling technologies. Another precursor was Intel's formal endorsement of 802.16a-based Wi-MAX fixed-wireless access in the sub-11-GHz band, which the company saw primarily as a cheap backhaul mechanism for Wi-Fi hotspots.

So Pawlowski and Kahn turned to university professors. "We told them what we were doing and offered them research grants to work on it," said Pawlowski. Intel also gave students the chance to come in-house and implement those designs that looked promising.

The idea worked out. Indeed, the VCO work Intel presented in Kyoto derived from work by a graduate student who is now an employee. "The results are much better than what we would have gotten had we gone looking for the best-and-brightest RF guy," said Pawlowski. "The students were pretty fresh."

Since those early days, the economy has loosened up a lot of RF talent. Pawlowski said he has a tough job keeping track of all the resumes. "We have made some very good hires from the industry."

"What's happening now," said Gelsinger, "is that Intel is the big player: With our Centrino offering we are shipping more radios than anyone else on the planet in the Wi-Fi space. We're becoming the success that people want to be part of and work for in the future."

The university grants continue, with Gelsinger's group alone issuing 400 per year. Instead of acquiring startups, Gelsinger is sticking with a simpler strategy of funding research and dispersing dollars among companies devising technologies that could help in the dissemination of Wi-Fi. "I can give a research grant of $50,000 to five different researchers and have them solve my problems," he said. "I now have five of the top people on the planet working for me for $250,000. If I buy one company I'll have to at least spend a few million."

There's still a long way to go before wireless becomes as ubiquitous as the PC. It remains to be seen whether "Intel Outside" becomes as familiar a motto as today's "Intel Inside."