By Michael V. Copeland

If you want a hint at where innovation in the gadget world is headed, talk to the chip guys. These nuggets of insanely complex silicon that companies like Intel, AMD (AMD), Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell (MRVL) are creating today will end up in the phones, laptops, televisions and mobile video/music/Internet devices of tomorrow.

We all know that Intel is dead-set on making WiMax — wireless access measured in square miles — a reality. When they start shipping WiMax PC cards in laptops is another matter (Intel (INTC) said it’ll be around the middle of the year), but when they do, your laptop might start acting and looking more like the tidy mobile device it should be. Think about a sub-subnotebook machine, always connected to a broadband signal — it might make video calls via VoIP, stream movies, take photos and send them wirelessly back home or to the office. I want one now, but it doesn’t happen without the chipset (and the network infrastructure to go along with it). That’s a ways in the future for most of us, especially in the United States. But the capability is coming soon, and a raft of new gadgets that take advantage of it will follow.

One of the most interesting chip trends I saw last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was encapsulated in a little device called the Eye-Fi. Here’s a gadget that exists today, but has lots of implications for tomorrow. What the Eye-Fi does is automatically stream photos from your digital camera via your Wi-Fi network to your PC or an online photo service. What the Eye-Fi team has done essentially is wrap a service around a common flash memory card and a low-power Wi-Fi chip from Atheros (ATHR). It’s these lower power Wi-Fi chips that are extremely interesting, when you start thinking about other services they enable.

All the manufacturers in that realm of the chip business are working on prototypes that are as power efficient and powerful as possible. But think about all the things that can happen if you can put Wi-Fi into all sorts of mobile and fixed devices and connect them to either the Internet or a private network. Gadgets get smart and can receive, send and potentially respond to whatever information they are set up to handle.

It could be smarter light switches that turn off and on via an e-mail or text message, or LCD picture frames that stream your e-mail to your bedside and upload a recipe to the kitchen screen every day before dinner. Or maybe some slick mini-display that scrolls updates from your Facebook friends on one side, reads you the news on the other, and does any number of other things that you find important or entertaining.

Who knows? The possibilities are numerous, but it begins with these chips now starting to ship. It also calls into question the future of other wireless standards like Bluetooth and Zigbee. Zigbee, a low-power wireless technology, has never really taken off. Bluetooth has, but combining Bluetooth with Wi-Fi in devices is much more of a headache than engineers would like it to be. Low-power Wi-Fi plays nicely with its full-power brethren and has the potential to sweep both other wireless standards away.

In the Broadcom (BRCM) booth at CES I got a demonstration of a lower power chip now ready to ship that allowed for high-definition video, graphics and audio in such a small package that you can already see all the little video devices/phones it will spawn. One very cool potential application combined that low power HD video chip with a motion control chip that Broadcom builds for the Wii controller and another very popular music device/phone that begins with the letter “i.” Basically, you get a handheld Wii, which, I would bet you’ll be seeing sometime in the near future.

By Michal Lev-Ram

LAS VEGAS — Paul Jacobs got his start in a robotics lab in the south of France. Now he runs Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest wireless technology companies. Fortune sat down with Jacobs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to talk about the future of wireless services like mobile TV, 4G technology and Qualcomm’s recent legal troubles. Late last month Qualcomm suffered a significant setback when a federal judge barred the San Diego-based company from selling chips that infringe on patents held by chipmaker Broadcom’s (BRCM).

Let’s talk about MediaFLO, your live mobile TV standard. I know Verizon (VZ) has already launched it and AT&T (T) has signed on. Are you happy with the progress you’ve made so far?

It’s like any service, you’d like to have more people on the service as quick as possible, more devices out there and more content. It’s like any new technology — it takes a little while before things start to take off. Plus, there were a lot of things we had to do to get it running. We had to get a lot of rights cleared for it. It really wasn’t just about getting a technology going, it was a much broader ecosystem that had to be built up. It’s moving along but, like anything, you always want to go faster.

What was the thinking behind developing yet another mobile TV standard?

The genesis was looking at doing broadcast TV over the cellular network. We realized you couldn’t really do it economically, so we said, how about we start with a clean sheet of paper? How do we build something that really will provide great multimedia and very high quality video at a fairly inexpensive price? That’s why we decided to start from scratch. And, in fact, when we started it, it wasn’t the case that there were other competing technologies for broadcast out there. That kind of came as we were doing the development of MediaFLO. I think we felt like we could do a better job.

What’s your take on the different 4G [high-speed cellular networks] technology standards and when do you think we’ll see mainstream adoption of 4G in the United States?

Obviously Sprint’s (S) talked about rollouts of their service starting in the end of 2008. But the WiMax technology that that’s based off of hasn’t really been developed specifically for mobile use — it doesn’t handle handoffs [transferring calls or data from one cell tower to another] and streaming as well as I would say the next version of it should. Then there are two other technologies: There’s LTE [Long Term Evolution, a 4G standard designed for GMS networks], which Verizon recently said they’ll look at as one of their paths going forward and there’s the UMB [Ultra Mobile Broadband] technology that we worked on. We will be able to roll out chipsets and infrastructure for UMB in the 2009 time frame. But for the most part, I think you won’t see mainstream, major adoption of 4G technologies until a few more years. As with any of these technologies it takes a little while to get through the teething pains and really get it up into the large volumes.

In the past Verizon has been a reliable proponent of your technologies. What kind of impact does Verizon’s decision to embrace LTE have on Qualcomm (QCOM)?

We developed a lot of LTE technology as well. Early on we had been working on various technologies that go into LTE, so we have a lot of intellectual property in it. Plus, we make chips for all different technologies, so we’ll make chips that have LTE in them as well. And really from our core business standpoint, it’s not that big of a difference which technology they chose. For us it’s just another opportunity to put some more tech into the chipsets. Sure, we prefer the technologies that we’ve done all of the system design for, but, in fact, all of these technologies have aspects of our designs in them.

Are you still hopeful about the prospects of UMB?

We’re doing trials with other operators in other countries, so I think there’s still an opportunity for it.

You’ve been involved in several patent disputes recently. Most recently there was an injunction against several Qualcomm products that were found to infringe on Broadcom patents. What kind of impact will that have on the company?

We announced that we have a set of chips where we’ve actually designed out the [infringing technology]. There’s a short-term impact on us and our customers in switching those customers from the chips that they were using to these new chips. We believe that we’ll be able to have those handsets on the market before the end of this quarter. So there is that short-term impact, but we believe that we’ll be able to mitigate it by the end of the quarter. In the medium term there were some products that were in design that we have to make some modifications to. In the long term they had this sunsetting period as part of the injunction which said that we could continue to sell certain products for a certain period of time. We have that time frame by which we have to do a full design-around for some of the other patents. It’s really just a question of getting clarification from the court in time so that we can get the design-around done.

What are some things you think we’ll be doing with our phones five years from now that we’re not doing today?

One of the things that’s exciting is we have this new microprocessor technology that’s got about 10 times better power consumption than the existing thing you have in your laptop. I think we’re going to see people doing a lot of computing in a device that’s handheld and pocketable. Obviously entertainment is going to be big, and there’s 3D gaming, data services and music services. Then there’s navigation. I think we’ll see some interesting combinations with that and services that already exist on the web. And over time, you’ll see the phone take more and more of a role in mobile commerce.

By Michael V. Copeland

LAS VEGAS — The quiet here in a booth sponsored by Dell is at odds with the pandemonium all around at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Four plywood lounge chairs designed by Charles and Ray Eames sit on a dark floor made of some obviously recycled material. In one chair , a guy with headphones covering most of his head quietly taps on a laptop. Squares of drought-resistant grass act as a border around displays highlighting how to live and work with less impact on the environment. A Plexiglas wall invites people to use a grease pencil and answer the question, “What Does Green Mean to You?”

Although it is often wrapped up in a good deal of marketing hype, it’s a question that is beginning to be asked by the exhibitors here at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Much of the “greening” of the technology world is by necessity. Stringent manufacturing standards and recycling goals must be met. But for their own success, gadget makers are developing new technologies that consume less energy so they can provide longer run times or cooler operating environments.

The goal is better functioning products that happen also to be greener than the power-sucking alternatives. Chip makers like Intel (INTC), Broadcom (BRCM) and Marvell (MRVL) have been beating that drum for several years and are getting amazing results. At this year’s CES, Broadcom is showing off powerful yet very efficient chips that enable things like the playback of high-definition  video on a cell phone. Other companies like Sony (SNE) and Samsung are using organic light emitting diodes to offer super-thin, bright and incredibly efficient screens. Are these kinds of technologies overtly green? No, but they are headed in the right direction.

A new cluster of companies at CES this year featuring “sustainable technologies” are overtly environmental. Some of the companies in this group include, Freeplay Energy which makes solar-powered radios and Meraki Networks, which sells solar-powered WiFi gear and aims to build a free WiFi network in San Francisco. This CES green group is a start, but it is a ridiculously small bunch of fewer than 10 companies.

Still other companies outside of this group have come to CES with a green agenda. One that is making a splash at CES is a company called Green Plug. The Silicon Valley startup previewed its technology Monday — an electronics component chip that provides a layer of intelligence so that gadgets can talk to their power source and make more efficient use of energy, whether it’s from a battery or a wall plug. Applications range from consumer electronics to cars, aircraft and power tools. And GM (GM) on Tuesday will unveil its Cadillac Provoq concept car, which it says will be “free from petroleum fuel and emissions.” That can only mean all-electric or maybe a hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle.

Back at Dell’s little green oasis, which must be noted is separate from the massive main Dell (DELL) booth and is tucked into the “sustainable technologies” area, spokesman Adam Schaeffer looks around at the mostly empty booth and stresses, “This is all about promoting the start of a conversation.” Nigel Williams, one of the 140,000 CES warriors here in attendance, walks up to the Plexiglas wall and ponders the question, “What Does Green Mean to You?” Next to replies already written in green, yellow and pink grease pencil that say things like “Hope” and “Breathing clean air,” Williams writes a simple statement, “There needs to be more green products.”

He’s right.