Phiar's Rentschler says that instead of being confined to a single chip in a single location in a computer or TV, his firm's antennas and transceivers can be distributed in tiny strips all over a consumer device, allowing it to pick up a signal from any direction.

Of course, other radio developers, such as the leading 60-GHz silicon firm SiBeam, in Sunnyvale, Calif., have solutions for the band's directionality problem, too. SiBeam chief technical officer Jeffrey Gilbert says his company's RF chip looks for the receiver, and if it's not directly in sight, the receiver figures out the best path to ricochet the signal—off a wall or the floor—to get to the target.

Not everyone is convinced that Phiar's technology will make it into upcoming consumer devices. “I would personally be very skeptical of anyone saying they will put semiconductors out of business anytime soon,” says John Cressler, a professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, who studies the 60-GHz band. Though Phiar's tunneling-based approach will produce fast circuits, he says, silicon-germanium and CMOS chips have the advantage at 60 GHz if for no other reason than that they are already nearing production.

IBM's Brian Gaucher agrees. His company is developing silicon-germanium-based 60-GHz chips. “I don't doubt the device physics,” says the Yorktown Heights, N.Y.–based research staff member, “but I think that traditional silicon, due to its maturity, is the technology that will likely be leveraged to enable the HD-multimedia revolution.”

Behzad Razavi, an electrical engineering professor at University of California, Los Angeles, adds that while Phiar has demonstrated an ability to use quantum tunneling to make fast devices, it is not clear whether those fast devices can be integrated into actual applications. “Everything they have in their products is single devices,” he says. “Diodes, transistors—these are single components.” In an integrated system, countless components running at a 60-GHz frequency must work together flawlessly. But the metal interconnects between them are extremely difficult to manage at such high frequencies. “You have these little components, each good for 60 GHz, but the wires have introduced their own problems,” Razavi says.