Nitero

Nitero
Information
Type	Private
Industry	Fabless semiconductors, wireless VR
Founder	Pat Kelly, Sven Mesecke
Headquarters	Austin, Texas, United States
Notable Personnel	Pat Kelly (CEO), Sven Mesecke (vice president of business development)
Products	NT4600 60 GHz 802.11ad chip; wireless VR link technology

Nitero was a fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a design center in Melbourne, Australia, that developed 60 GHz millimeter-wave wireless chips based on the IEEE 802.11ad (WiGig) standard. The company grew out of 60 GHz CMOS research at the Australian research center NICTA and the University of Melbourne. It first targeted smartphones and other mobile devices, then turned to wireless links that would remove the cable between a gaming PC and a tethered virtual reality headset.

In October 2016, Nitero said that Valve had invested a "significant amount" in the company. On 10 April 2017, AMD announced that it had acquired intellectual property and key engineering talent from Nitero, including its phased-array beamforming millimeter-wave chip for wireless VR and augmented reality headsets. The terms were not disclosed.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every claim against the 16 cited sources (Nitero, NICTA-era, funding, NT4600, 2016 wireless VR demos, Valve investment and AMD 2017 IP acquisition reports). About review dates.

History

NICTA origins

In February 2008, NICTA announced a 60 GHz transceiver that it described as the "world's first transceiver integrated on a single chip". It was built on IBM's 130 nm RF CMOS process, used the 57-64 GHz unlicensed band and was said to reach up to 5 gigabits per second over an indoor range of about 10 meters. A team that included 10 PhD students from the University of Melbourne worked on it, and NICTA said it planned to set up a separate company to sell the technology to electronics manufacturers. In August 2009, iTWire reported that the spin-off was stalled because NICTA had not found a lead venture capital investor; Professor Skafidas said that many people had expressed willingness to join a syndicate, "but we need to find a lead".

Sources differ on when the spin-off happened. A 2012 iTWire report says Nitero was spun off from NICTA in 2010 to commercialize its 60 GHz wireless LAN technology, while Nitero's own 2014 press release says the company spun out of NICTA in 2011, after CMOS millimeter-wave research carried out at NICTA and the University of Melbourne from 2004 to 2011.

Mobile 60 GHz chips (2011-2015)

In May 2011, TechPartner News reported that Nitero, described as NICTA's US-based spin-off, had received a Commercialisation Australia grant of $1.43 million from the Australian Government. The money was to go toward reducing the chip's size, power consumption and cost. Patrick Kelly was named as chief executive, and the company was a member of the WiGig Alliance.

On 6 August 2012, Nitero said it had begun demonstrating its "multi-gigabit, ultra-low power" 60 GHz Wi-Fi solution to selected industry partners. In the same announcement, Trailblazer Capital joined and led a new funding round, alongside founding investors Southern Cross Venture Partners and Austin Ventures; the amount was not disclosed. Nitero pitched the technology as a way for phones and tablets to connect to docking stations, peripherals and displays without physical connectors.

On 16 July 2014, Nitero introduced the NT4600, the first product in its "60G" family, which it marketed as the first end-to-end IEEE 802.11ad solution designed for mobile devices. The chip was made on Samsung's 28 nm RF process, built on the 28 nm HKMG LPP platform. Nitero said the NT4600 was up to 10 times more power efficient than 802.11ad solutions designed for PCs. Kelly said, "At Nitero, we targeted the smartphone from day one." At the time, the company was demonstrating the chip to selected partners and customers and planned production shipments for 2015.

Wireless VR (2016-2017)

In January 2016, Nitero showed UploadVR a wireless link sending about 3 Gbps of data to a screenless head-mounted display that also returned head position data to the PC. A separate demo ran the company's video compression inside a wired Oculus Rift DK2 at a ratio of about 4:1. CEO Pat Kelly said he expected a product with a hardware partner in the second half of 2016, probably sold first as an accessory rather than bundled with headsets. Vice president of business development Sven Mesecke said the system was being designed to scale to future high-resolution headsets, including 8K. The company also said it was in talks with "all" major headset makers, without naming any.

On 12 October 2016, while Valve's Steam Dev Days conference was under way, Mesecke told UploadVR that Valve had invested a "significant amount" in Nitero. He said the earlier line-of-sight problem had been solved with "customized beam forming", that Nitero would license its technology to third parties rather than sell consumer products, and that the end-of-2016 release target had shifted. Nitero was also talking to makers of 360-degree cameras and other peripherals. In 2017, Road to VR wrote that among the several companies working to make high-end tethered headsets wireless, Nitero was the only one to have received an investment from Valve.

Acquisition by AMD

AMD announced the deal on 10 April 2017 from Sunnyvale, California. It described Nitero as a pioneer in millimeter-wave solutions and said the acquired technology could support multi-gigabit transmission with low latency in room-scale VR environments, with beamforming used to overcome the line-of-sight requirement of conventional high-frequency millimeter-wave systems. Kelly, named in the release as Nitero's co-founder and CEO, joined AMD as corporate vice president, Wireless IP. AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster said that "unwieldly headset cables remain a significant barrier to drive widespread adoption of VR". Road to VR reported that AMD took the bulk of Nitero's IP and key personnel. KitGuru reported that AMD said it would not make wireless head-mounted displays itself.

Products

Product	Announced	Description
NT4600	16 July 2014	60 GHz IEEE 802.11ad chip for mobile devices on Samsung's 28 nm RF process; up to 4.6 Gbps peer-to-peer using 16-QAM; transmit and receive beamforming; PCI Express host interface; Android driver support; low-latency 4K wireless display
Wireless VR link	January 2016 (demonstration)	60 GHz link plus video compression for PC-tethered headsets; licensed to partners rather than sold as a consumer product

XR work

Nitero's VR system combined two parts: a 60 GHz transmitter and video encoding meant to deliver the image data to the headset with low latency. In January 2016 the company listed the following claims for it:

Parameter	Nitero claim (January 2016)
Latency	In the order of hundreds of microseconds
Compression ratio	Configurable from 4:1 to above 16:1
Data rate	4.6 Gbps (3.5 Gbps effective throughput)
Power	As low as 500 mW
Other	Non-line-of-sight and multiplayer support

At that point the demo still lost performance when the antenna lost line of sight. Nitero planned to fix this with three RF arrays for spatial diversity, which it had not yet shown. By the time of the AMD deal, Road to VR described Nitero's compression engine as royalty-free and visually lossless, adding about one millisecond of end-to-end latency, and reported the company's claims that the solution drew under one watt and would cost less than the cables it replaced.

See also

• WiGig
• HTC Vive Wireless Adapter
• TPCAST
• PC VR