Qualcomm has completed its acquisition of Wilocity, the developer of the Wigig wireless standard, and also announced a family of tri-band platforms that combine Wi-Fi and WiGig solutions. Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Wilocity has been developing 60 GHz wireless chipsets based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard, also known as WiGig technology. Chips based on WiGig technology wirelessly transfer data between devices at speeds of up to 7Gbps over a limited distance.

While 802.11ac enables Gigabit Wi-Fi networks to offload mobile traffic, 60 GHz technology brings multi-gigabit speeds, capacity improvements, and power efficiency. With the integration of WiGig into its mobile platforms, Qualcomm will enable mobile devices to provide near-instantaneous access to the cloud, and allowing for greater cellular network offload. 802.11ad also extends the Qualcomm VIVE portfolio, and builds on the company?s recent initiatives to enhance Wi-Fi networks with 11ac 2.0 solutions with MU-MIMO.

Qualcomm's initial tri-band platform is a reference design based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, which supports WiGig to enable applications such as 4k video streaming.

It integrates the multi-gigabit performance of 802.11ad operating in the 60 GHz spectrum band along with 802.11ac that operates in the 5 GHz band and 802.11b/g/n in the 2.4 GHz band.

In combination, 11ad and 11ac create a powerful wireless solution, coupling the whole home coverage of 11ac with the in-area multi-gigabit connectivity of 11ad.

With the Wilocity acquisition, Qualcomm put itself in direct competition with Broadcom.