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.

Apple this week lowered the price for the original 8GB iPod Touch and introduced two new higher-priced models , with 32 and 64Gbytes of memory respectively.

The chip inside is the Broadcom BCM4329, announced last December , the first Broadcom 11n product designed for mobile devices. 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. Full details are in the company?s data sheet for the chip. 

The chip was discovered during a step-by-step disassembly of a brand-new 32GB iPod Touch by iFixit , a Web site founded in 2003 by a pair of Cal Poly tinkerers, to help other people tinker with their electronics. 

They discovered the Broadcom chip at step 14 . An enlarged image shows the Broadcom name and chip identification.

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.

But the BCM4329 uses only one 11n data stream with one antenna, compared to the 11n radios in most laptops, which use two. With the other 11n technologies, that means the Broadcom chip maxes out at ?just? 50Mbps.

Wi-Fi becomes a big drain on mobile batteries. Broadcom used a range of technologies to minimize power demand by reducing power consumption when active, and when idle.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle