Wi-Fi Chip Uncovered Inside iPod Touch

[RossMc]

A mysterious discovery has been unearthed inside the new iPod Touch.

According to the San Franciso Chronicle, a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip was discovered during the dissection of the new 32GB iPod Touch by the makers of iFixit, a Web site founded six years ago to help people "tinker with their electronics."

The new Apple iPod Touch uses a Wi-Fi chip that can support the just-approved high-throughput 802.11n standard, though Apple apparently has not switched on the cranked-up wireless link. If it does, the iPod Touch (which is almost identical to the iPhone but lacks the 3G cellular radio) could support a 50Mbps data rate, more than twice that of the current 802.11ag radios used by the product family.

The single chip combines 802.11n with 802.11abg,Bluetooth, and FM radio. It runs in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The chip reflects the range of implementations available to chip and equipment vendors. The 802.11n technology exploits multiple-input multiple-output splitting a high-rate data stream into, today, two slower streams, each sent from and to a corresponding pair of antennas. It creates a kind of parallel transceiving capability, which dramatically multiplies 11n's capacity.

Although the discovery of the chip inside the iPod Touch was surprising, Apple's use of the chip isn't - they've been employing 11n in their desktop products since 2007.

We don't know yet if 802.11n will be supported in the iPod Touch software, but at least the hardware's there.

Article from modmyi

[styfle]

http://gizmodo.com/5357667/new-ipod-...or-nano-camera

Another article claiming:
"The chip also supports FM transmission, meaning that software support down the line could allow users to stream music directly to car stereos without any extra hardware"