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Right now, wireless data dreams — which are far different from those recurring dreams in which you show up to school in your underwear — involve music downloads and wireless gaming systems that let subscribers compete with each other from thousands of miles away. But at a February conference in San Francisco, Australian researchers with Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs introduced a chip for mobile handsets that could take wireless data to a whole new level — one barely even dreamed of by the casual wireless Web user.

The unnamed chip is the first turbo decoder that supports the High Speed Download Packet Access, or HSDPA, standard that is part of the wideband CDMA family. It is capable of handling data speeds of up to 24 Mb/s — nearly 10 times faster than the world's most advanced wireless data network, Lucent said, and roughly the same velocity at which Aussie star Paul Hogan's movie career flamed out. At that speed, even bandwidth-intensive applications like high-definition television could be streamed to wireless devices.

According to Ran Yan, vice president of wireless research for Bell Labs, one of the primary advances that made this speed possible was a process that reduces the number of steps the chip must follow in order to perform a certain function. This is achieved by using a complex logarithm that allows for twice as many inputs — or signals allowed into a circuit — than did earlier logarithms used in wireless data. “We came up with a logarithm that can in one step address the needs of two steps,” Yan said.

Improved chip speeds allow for the implementation of turbo codes — software programs that perform error correction by adding several redundant bits of data to each bit. Such redundancy helps the chip reconstruct the original signal without producing errors at the receiving end.

Reducing the number of steps needed to perform a function serves another purpose as well: It reduces the chip's power requirements, one of the main obstacles in any silicon advancement.

“If you reduce the amount of things you have to do, you save power as well as cost,” Yan said. That inherent power reduction is combined with other power reduction techniques such as adjusting the power supply to meet demand, creating less of a drain on a device's battery.

Because Lucent doesn't make end-user devices, the company plans to license the technology to handset manufacturers. The vendor's current schedule calls for the availability of compatible base stations in 2006, but Lucent will accelerate that schedule if it sees a demand — the need for speed, if you will.