Terahertz Wireless Chip Will Bring 30Gbps Networks 177
MrSeb writes "Rohm, a Japanese semiconductor company, has created a silicon chip and antenna that's currently capable of transmitting 1.5Gbps, with the potential to scale up to 30Gbps in the future. While this is a lot faster than anything currently on the market, the significant advance here is the reception and transmission of terahertz waves (300GHz to 3THz) using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long. Rohm says it will only cost $5 when it comes to market in a few years — a stark comparison to current terahertz gear that's both large and expensive. The problem with terahertz transmissions, though, is that it's highly directional — with a submillimeter wavelength, it's more like a laser than a signal. Terahertz waves might enable awesome device-to-device networks, but it isn't going to bring 30Gbps internet to a whole city block. More interestingly, submillimeter terahertz radiation is the next step up from the gigahertz radiation used in full-body millimeter wave scanners. Terahertz waves can not only see through clothing, but can also penetrate a few millimeters of skin."
Next mod... (Score:2, Funny)
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This could be very handy for searching for government implanted transmitters inside your own body. I look forward to a day when we can cast aside our crudely fashioned aluminum hats
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Which part of "can penetrate a few millimeters of skin" is 'interesting' rather than 'scary'?
Re:Next mod... (Score:5, Informative)
Terahertz radiation is non-ionizing, unlike say X-Rays. This type of radiation is used in things like bomb detectors and to inspect explosives and other unstable compounds because it can penetrate a few millimeters but does not break down molecular bonds.
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Non ionizing != safe.
There's a reason there's a little grill on your microwave door window.
Somehow I doubt these will be transmitting a 1000W. It can still be safe, even without the little grill.
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You are so incorrect. At least do a cursory Wikipedia search before you make a claim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation [wikipedia.org]
Even 1 gamma ray can knock an electron off an atom, causing molecular changes (e.g. damaging DNA). No amount of IR will do this, it will just cause thermal effects (burns).
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I'm not saying ionizing radiation isn't hazardous. Radar systems on aircraft, microwave radio transmitters, and high-frequency transmitters have warnings for that exact reason.
What I was trying to say, is that any wavelength in the electronmagnetic spectrum is dangerous at a level inversely proportional to the wavelength. Shorter wavelengths like gamma-rays, X-rays, UV are enough to penetrate the skin and cause damage to DNA with just photon.
Cellular repair from burns leads to rapid cell divisions and more
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Yea, because heat causes cancer.
Better turn off your heaters!
(what part of non-ionizing don't you understand? Either it reflects, or is absorbed as heat.) They quite simply don't have the energy to do anything bad when they interact.
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Sorry, didn't realize you were being satirical. I thought you were serious :P
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Well, I think you could probably go through some existing data and see if hyperthermia (eg heat stroke) victims have a higher incidence of cancer. You should go the other way and check hypothermia as well to be thorough.
Since both of those are caused by "wrong" core temperatures, what you see there should apply to intracellular heating/cooling as well. But in this case, we are assuming the radio waves doing the heating could penetrate much much further into the body than they can.
The Future (Score:3)
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Run Windows Update and be done in about 15 minutes.
Re:The Future (Score:5, Funny)
You mean the one restart that takes a minute and a half on Windows 7?
Followed by thirteen and a half minutes for all the crapware to start up after you log in.
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I went from XP to Vista and was very disappointed. When my Vista installed died of filesystem corruption, I went to Windows 7 thinking "what the hell, probably just as bad and can't really be worse?"
Upon second boot, I thought something was wrong when I saw the ESET splash screen come so soon after logging in. I was genuinely surprised and impressed to have my desktop available for use so soon. It was a little sluggish, but far more usable then Vista or XP ever were as soon it was presented to me. Hiber
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You mean the one restart that takes a minute and a half on Windows 7?
Followed by thirteen and a half minutes for all the crapware to start up after you log in.
But at least the crapware will update itself quickly!
Re:The Future (Score:5, Funny)
Cook chicken, most likely
Re:The Future (Score:4, Funny)
Share porn with your neighbor across the street at never before seen transfer speeds.
Re:The Future (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, 640K ought to be enough for everyone!
Re:The Future (Score:5, Interesting)
They said the same about broadband: "What could anyone possibly do with 20mbps? They barely use the 56k we give them!"
Give them the bandwidth - they'll find a good use for it. I can see it being very useful in a small/medium server room - 30Gbps makes it a competitive LAN system. Having a bunch of wireless cards would be much easier than running all that cable, even if some manual aiming and orientation of antennas is necessary.
I also imagine "the cloud" would benefit from this - even 1.5gbps is basically SATA speeds. Latency is higher, but the potential throughput gains are impressive. That may make it possible for "local storage" to be "operating system and cloud sync software", with everything being server-side somewhere. You and I may not join in (I don't like the privacy most of the cloud has), but many people don't give a shit about that.
Gaming might also benefit. Current online gaming depends a lot on synchronizing things, then letting the clients do a lot of the calculation. Updating the position of falling objects is almost always client-side, with the server checking every once in a while. It's a major headache, code-wise. With a suitably massive pipe, it becomes unnecessary - just send the coordinates every frame.
Or it makes video streaming work properly. Dealing with current streaming is rough on networks, as it needs to get there quickly. 30gbps to the home, and you can download an entire blu-ray, uncompressed, in two seconds. Latency can be looser - nobody's going to complain if it takes three seconds instead of two. There was an article on /. about that a couple months back.
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A lot of systems already support 10 Gbps Ethernet on UTP and fibre. 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet is coming.
At 10 Gbps, iSCSI is already faster, cheaper and even lower latency than most 8 Gbps FibreChannel solutions, pushing FibreChannel even more into the highend niche markets it already is.
After the fairly new SATA 6 Gbit/s, it looks like SATA Express is will be connected directly to the PCI Express bus without needing a SATA controller.
This 30 Gbps wireless stuff is probably only useful for point-to-point and
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Yes, there's already 10+Gbps ethernet stuff. But that's honestly overkill for a lot of small/medium businesses' servers. Even 10Gbps is sort of overkill going to an Exchange server for 100 people. Few companies would pay extra to get 100GE to everything unless it actually benefits something.
Many companies, however, would pay a little extra to cut down on cable nests. Easier maintenance, easier expandability... those all serve business purposes. Bosses like to hear "this investment will cost $X, and save us
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A lot have replaced 4 or more 1 Gbps with one 10 Gbps on the vmware/whatever-virt. servers.
Re:The Future (Score:5, Informative)
apparently nothing, because higher frequencies have horrible ranges. This stuff might work at ridiculously short range, but also won't be able to penetrate through anything which would enable it to work anywhere significant. Look at how tough even the 2.4ghz stuff like wireless devices can barely even penetrate a few walls, and now we're talking terahertz?
Long story short, nothing, because this product will never even give you 1.5Gbps.
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What about reflection? Just because they can't go through the wall doesn't mean they can't reflect off the other wall and through the door.
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I think that absorption is a problem when you get even into the 100GHz range or so. The atmosphere is relatively transparent to radiation below a few GHz, and to the range that contains visible light (probably the reason we can see that range), but it is fairly opaque to everything else.
Water and oxygen and various other molecules absorb energy across a huge range of the spectrum. That's why telescopes outside of the more traditional radio and visible wavelengths need to be located at high altitude.
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what part of "you'll be lucky if the signal can travel 1 centimeter" makes you think that reflecting off of anything would matter? I don't mean this as an insult towards you, just a matter of practicality. It wouldn't work.
This could have use in the same way that body scanners work, or the concept of a wireless connection from hardware to hardware - think of those "stone" chargers where you just drop the phone on top of it, but instead being able to just put a graphics card on top to have it connect to your
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Well lets put it this way.
Your lamp, even if you block sight of it with your hand, you can still see the light it gives off, no? And if it was modulated (eg switched on and off) you would still see this, even though you have no line of sight? EM works the same way.
And the range is not only a handful of centimeters. The air doesn't absorb it THAT much...
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Here's an example of long range: FM frequencies, which go hundreds of miles. How low is the frequency? in the 88-> 175 megahertz range. Lower ranges work better.
Here's an example of short range: bluetooth, which can go up to 130 meters or so if I recall correctly. Bluetooth is in the gigahertz range.
I think you are possibly conflating radiation/emission and frequency itself - while they have things in common, they are not the same.
The "range" of the frequencies is theoretically infinite. It doesn't mean
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Different frequencies are absorbed by the 'air' to different amounts - I do realize this. I also realize that ionization of the air changes this. This is why sky-wave propagation changes throughout the day/night cycle.
I don't know the relationship between frequency and absorption though. I imagine there's a handy graph showing it at some normal density, humidity, and temperature, though?
Re:The Future (Score:5, Funny)
You can run through your comcast monthly bandwidth cap in 8.3 seconds.
Re:The Future (Score:4, Funny)
You going to rectify that?
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Somehow I have the feeling it might be a bad idea to be operated on by a robot which is connected over wireless.
Most operations like that happen on an operation table in an operating room I would imagine, probably not the place where wireless is needed.
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And you would be wrong. There are a number of robotic surgical systems now being deployed in Africa and other parts of the third world, allowing top surgeons the ability to provide much needed medical expertise in places that people would normally never have access. Its a great way to refine/perfect surgical robotics, and serve the poor and hard to reach people of the world at the same time.
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That's a bunch of crap.
Nothing, because a "GiB" is not a thing. 1 GB is 1073741824 Bytes. It always has been, and it always will be.
I think it's clear that everyone who uses "GiB" disagrees with you.
Note that the "G" is not an SI scalar. No one ever said it was, and there's no reason it needs to be.
Right, except that it uses the same symbol as the SI prefix (not scalar, prefix), has approximately the same value, was specifically chosen to have the same symbol and approximately same value intentionally, and so it easily confused with it.
T is Tesla. Or is it tera? K is Kelvin, or is it kilo? Gy is Giga...something? Oh no, it's just grays!
As you mention, there's no ambiguity because you can't have a bare prefix. T is just Tesla, since it's not followed by a unit. T(unit) is a tera-(unit), and (prefix)T is a (prefix)
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Nah, he was overly bombastic, but correct. The confusion is solely caused by the attempts to 'sensibly revise' a perfectly sensible binary numbering scheme. It's an attempt to force a decimal hierarchy on a system that is not decimal... attempting to make reality fit bureaucratic dictates, rather than the other way around.
Except that parts of reality aren't binary.
For example, communication protocols (like this one) are specified in powers-of-10 units because they're based on measuring wireless frequencies, which are measured in powers-of-10 hertz -- in this case, I'm sure that 1.5 Gbps means 1.5E9 bits per second. A 14.4 kbps modem transmitted 14,400 bits per second. A T-1 line transmits 1.54 Mbps, meaning 1,540,000 bits per second -- and note that framing and other overhead bits mean that you can't just divide by 8 to
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For example, communication protocols (like this one) are specified in powers-of-10 units because they're based on measuring wireless frequencies, which are measured in powers-of-10 hertz -- in this case, I'm sure that 1.5 Gbps means 1.5E9 bits per second. A 14.4 kbps modem transmitted 14,400 bits per second. A T-1 line transmits 1.54 Mbps, meaning 1,540,000 bits per second -- and note that framing and other overhead bits mean that you can't just divide by 8 to get bytes per second.
You, like many modem vendors who labelled their products at X kbps, instead of X k, are just wrong.
This is really funny, because you're "correcting" my correct terminology with incorrect terminology.
You're confusing BAUD with BITS. A 56k modem is 56,000 BAUD.
Nope. As a communications and networking geek who lived through much of this history and has spent a fair amount of time fiddling with modulation and coding algorithms, allow me to explain:
Baud rate is a measurement of the number of symbols per second transmitted across a communication line. The earliest modems encoded only one bit per symbol, so for those modems baud rate and bit rate were identical. Ev
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Anything is countable in binary or decimal. A count of sectors on a disk or bits on a wire is not naturally binary or decimal. It happens to be the case that for many uses, they're stored in binary, but we store numbers in binary and express them in decimal all the time.
The only real reason to have counts be powers of two is to make some internal math faster and more consistent. For example, because a memory page is 4096 bytes, you can mask the least significant 12 bits in a memory address to separate it in
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But, soft, for the common speech doth truly amend as the seasons turn. Else why wouldst it be that in uncounted years hence our distant progeny not speakest as ye and me?
Doesnt matter (Score:5, Funny)
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ISPs will still throttle your ass to 55 Mbps
I'd be quite happy if I was only getting throttled down to 55 Mbps on downstream. For Comcast the 50 Mbps plan is almost the most extreme one you can get. Think I get throttled all the way down to something like 10/1.
Step into the Tear o' Hurts scanner citizen (Score:3)
Step into the Tear o' Hurts scanner citizen, if you choose not to you may instead choose to be violated by the TSA sanctioned probulation team currently on work release from a local for profit penitentiary.
Run it by a RF EE next time (Score:5, Interesting)
Run it by a RF EE next time, or at least an advanced ham radio guy.
using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long
a stark comparison to current terahertz gear that's both large and expensive.
with a submillimeter wavelength
First of all its hard from a RF perspective to make stuff thats more than a 1/4 wavelength long. Obviously possible, but much harder. For example, I'm working on a K band transverter and one nightmare is standard SMA connectors resonate at 18 GHz or so, making them quite exciting to use. Yes I already know about the expensive and complicated and almost but not quite SMA compatible connectors I can use. Aside from connector and feedline issues, Its actually EASIER to make small stuff than large stuff at high frequencies / small wavelengths. Cable attenuation makes you put the whole RF works at the dish feedpoint above 50 GHz or so, if you want decent performance. The smaller it is, the lighter it is, more or less, making the mechanical engineering job simpler. Its not like 50 GHz amplifier dies are currently the size of dinner plates and will someday be the size of rice grains... they're already tiny. Ditto this chip. Also the silicon is cheap, the tools are expensive. A new ultrasonic wirebond machine must be worth, i donno, tens to hundreds of thousands of cheap MMIC dies? When you buy MMIC dies, its not like they're blowing lots of money on packaging... And thats before you hire the rare skilled labor to set up and operate and maintain the already expensive wire bonder. Wirebonding zero ohm resistors wouldn't really change the overall cost vs wirebonding some fancy dies because of the huge fixed and variable costs of the technology, so changing the die cost from ten dollars to ten cents isn't gonna help if the overall project cost due to R+D and manufacturing and test gear averages out to ten grand per active device...
Secondly complete THZ systems are large and remain large and will probably always be "large". The internal chips are already small, and, frankly, relatively cheap. Antenna cannot be magically shrunk for same performance. Support gear like bias and main power regulators don't "know" they're powering microwave gear and should therefore be shrinking at a microwave pace. DSP processors don't "know" they're connected to a shrinking MMIC die and therefore they should be shrinking at a microwave pace. Support gear does shrink over time at the rate of normal support gear shrinkage, which isn't that fast. For example, not much has changed in the world of linear voltage regulators in the last 30 years... somewhat lower current references, MOS pass transistors instead of bipolar means lower voltage drop, um... thats about it?
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Although the article claims to be talking about a silicon *transceiver* running at *300+GHz*, the graphics included in the article just have a planar horn antenna and a diode on an InP substrate all connected up to a SMA connector. A bit disappointing to be honest. No mention of whether they're using the diode as a detector or mixer (or both), but the pieces they are talking about appear to be a long ways away from an actual communication system.
One of the big problems faced in reality will be getting eno
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And if they are using some high-harmonic mixing with that diode then they're probably not going to meet regulatory emission requirements
subharmonic mixing is probably an analogy for what you're talking about, and yeah its a struggle to make that work. If you play games with waveguide between the mixer diodes and the antenna, which is a pretty decent high pass filter, and use some stubs, you can get great attenuation of the LO signal, but good luck cleaning up the images unless your IF is like 10 gigs.
Also like you said the power thing... subharmonic mixing is not known for efficiency, even with a crazy elaborate design covered with stub se
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All that being said... if you would please just RTFS you'll get the following little tidbit: "using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long". Note the second half of that and-combo and your initial problem of "Antenna cannot be magically shrunk for same performance" seems to be what they've solved.
IANAHFCD but I apparently can read...
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LOL... at "sub millimeter wavelengths" 2 cm is practically a longwire or a beverage antenna... 20, 30, 40 wavelengths long. Whatever they're doing, its pretty directive, and its never going to shrink, a 30 wavelength long sub millimeter band antenna is always going to be around 2 cm or so.
What about saturation? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the wireless tech in the world doesn't seem to be able to stand up against saturation in the band.
I say this, of course, as someone who lives in an apartment complex of 100's of units, all in close enough proximity that Wireless-N signals can be picked up pretty much anywhere in the complex from any users apartment. I had to forego wireless entirely and hard wire everything because every band was completely saturated with dozens of wireless networks. With the smart-switching shit that automatically looks for clean channels it's even worse; I've taken to illustrating the problem to friends at parties with the wifi scanner app on my phone, we all get a good laugh watching 10 networks bounce up and down the band constantly "Channel 1 is clean, quick, switch to channel 1! Shit, 9 other networks came with me...look, channel 3 is clean, quick, switch to channel 3! Fuck, they're following me! Channel 7 is clean, quick, switch to channel 7!!" all day long.
The wireless band is becoming way over saturated. Now that we have cars with built in hotspots it's going to get even worse. We need some sort of fundamental shift in the way we do wireless networking, either that, or we need to greatly expand the band and the range between channels so that 30 devices can cohabitate the same frequency range without completely fucking up throughput.
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As it's mentioned in the summary, the Terahertz frequencies are very directional, unlike the typical GHz stuff of wireless networks. So, instead of broadcasting for all the neighborhood you are transmitting more on a point to point fashion. Saturation is almost irrelevant in this scenario (as long as the signal dies off within the solar system).
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Great, when there's one transmitter focused at one receiver. What happens when there's 20 transmitters sending to 20 receivers all within close proximity to each other? Wifi worked just fine for me 5 years ago when there was only as handful of people using it in my complex, now that everyone has wifi the service has become so degraded it's practically unusable for anyone that is trying to do more than surf the internet (and even that is a chore, requiring many page reloads sometimes to get the full page t
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However, there may also be better ways to manage shared bandwidth, as you stated. Frankly, one solution is to sell slices of the spectrum to companies to manage autocratically and efficiently as they see fit. If there's a way to make more devices get more throughput on a limited spectrum by coo
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It still doesn't solve the problem. It may currently help, but eventually it's going to have the same problems of saturation no matter how directional it is.
Finding new bands to saturate is not going to help the problem. We need a much wider band with many more discrete channels and smarter routers that are able to cooperate among themselves and share the bands in the most effective, efficient ways possible. That in itself would go a long way towards solving these saturation problems and there would be p
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So, basically, this is going to be good for all those situations where I could just hard line but don't feel like getting off my ass to do it? Yeah, that's helpful. Why hard line and get gigabit when I can go THz wireless and not?
We're still going to need omnidirectional for all of our mobile devices, which are the real problem; there are too many fucking devices on the network. This doesn't alleviate that problem at all, so the benefit is what? It saves you from having to run an ethernet cable around y
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Aha, so *that* will be the reason why autonomous meshing becomes the standard and standardised. Because manufacturers who want to keep up with the increasing demand for wireless gadgets will have no other choice. Adapt or perish.
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In large 3d buildings, having a solution that goes through walls is a Bad Idea (TM)
A directional or a non-penetrating signal is ideal, especially if it is modulated in a way it is still useful after a bounce.
So you wire a house with a wifi hotspot in each room, that either broadcasts on about 10 GHz with 2 mW, or modulates an LED.
The LED has an advantage. You can see it. So you orient yourself so that your device can see it.
The downside of this sort of thing is that it's not just a 'buy it at Best Buy and
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I know it's traditional to skip reading the article, but the summary points out that this will be a directional-only signal. Directional signals generally don't have saturation problems, because they propagate (to simplify) in cones rather than spheres.
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A non-issue with THz! (Score:2)
In short: THz penetrates your T-shirt (airport scanners) but not any thin drywall.
Roughly speaking for electromagnetic waves the higher the frequency the more light-like the radiation becomes. THz is close to infrared light, it will not penetrate much but can be used to transmit a lot of data because you can modulate it with a much higher frequency than standard 2.4 GHz wireless LAN. This comes at a price though, if a person walks through the line-of-sight between your notebook and the hypothetical THz wir
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This is still below the ionization threshold, and so will not cause cancer at any appreciable rate.
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But might it detect it?...
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The imaging depth for THz is shallow enough that it could only theoretically detect skin cancers. Whether or not that's even reasonable is outside my expertise, though.
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Well, a lot of lower-frequency radiation (sub-microwave) should, but they have long (> cm) wavelengths, and generally in imaging you have a hard time resolving anything less than the wavelength of the light you're using.
I suppose the obvious answer is X-rays, since that's what they use, but that's ionizing. For a while people were working on visible-frequency imaging, but I don't really know how that turned out.
Satellite Wireless Router (Score:2)
This could open up cheap land to space communication. This begs the question, "What is the cheapest way to send a home built satellite into a geosynchronous orbit"?
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This could open up cheap land to space communication.
No... if you read the article you will see that these waves are affected by radiation. Last time I checked, space has a lot of radiation.
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Thanks!
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Great link. Thanks!
Hope you like rain fade (Score:2)
In short:
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Terahertz is not very practical (Score:5, Informative)
A stable local oscillator that puts out any useful amount of terahertz power is very difficult to make. You are lucky to get a few microwatts. The signals aren't quite as directional as a laser, but they're too directional to be of much use for the wireless networking that we are familiar with.
There are optical ways of making signals at terahertz frequencies, which may hold more promise, but they're being used in only a few exotic applications, such as the ALMA interferometer array in Chile.
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Blog of blog of blog of ... - finding real info (Score:2)
Three ad-heavy blogs deep, the best I'm able to find is a brief note in Electronics (AU) [electronicsnews.com.au] . It's not even clear if the device pictured is an emitter or a detector.
Terahertz RF is essentially line of sight, and has roughly the propagation characteristics of light. This is not going to be useful for WiFi or cellular telephony. Imaging, though, may work. Here's a good paper [okstate.edu] on the subject. In the terahertz range, both RF and optical techniques are used; there are both antennas and lenses. The high end of t
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Definitely could be useful for line-of-site backbones, though. Years ago I worked for a guy and we set up some of proprietary 2.4ghz bridges for just that purpose.
Welcome To The World Of Tomorrow!!! (Score:2)
I can see it now. XXX websites dedicated to upskirt full body scan pr0n.
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If these are both highly directional *and* cheap.. (Score:2)
Seems to me you could quite easily use them to connect houses in an urban setting. Since they're cheap you could use one device for every home and since they're highly directional you could turn them off and on depending upon whether the homeowner wants to be connected (or has paid the bill). Put 15 or 20 in a central location and one at each house. This eliminates all the complexities of getting individual fiber to the houses, too.
Wireless standard, 30gbps now hang on,..... (Score:2)
As an IT nerd, I've used my fair share of 802.11g and 802.11n networks.
802.11g I have never, ever seen more than 3.0MBytes/s sustained transfer rate about 24mbits.
802.11n I've delt with mostly 300mbit equipment, the highest sustained and consistent speed I've seen is 10MBytes/s across a large transfer, the average I would say is 5 or 6 but I have seen a sustained 10 multiple times. NEVER faster, ever! That's 80mbits per second.
On a 100mbit network, I've never seen a sustained speed of over 10 to 11MBytes/s
Re:Getting tired of this.... (Score:5, Interesting)
To complain that network technology never really improves is the height of absurdity.
Despite what the blurb says, this technology may finally be a good competitor for wired ethernet to the home. It's directional, so it doesn't have to be shared among a huge number of houses, and at $5/pop you can build a "disco-ball" covered with them to blanket an area. It won't penetrate walls well, but will penetrate adverse weather better than laser light.
Short of replacing Comcast, at least we can finally have a wireless HDMI "cable" that is affordable, so I can hook any number of terminals to a computer without having to bunch them all together.
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We should be able to implement a filter that stops these kinds of posts within a few years.
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But I think people are mistaken for not seeing the link between these types of announcements, and the incremental increases in capability and reductions in price that we are accustomed to seeing in new products. It's so easy to just assume Moore's "Law" will continue to hold, likewise for hard drive density, networking, and other applications such as medical imaging, as if that just comes natural
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Hmm, I like that idea. Put a little 'disco ball' (likely will look more like one of those little white-dome motion sensors) in the ceiling of rooms, and multicast the video signal out from them. Watch HDTV on any device capable of receiving the signal! If the bandwidth allows you can easily multicast different streams and such...
And it can function as a 'hub' - allowing communication between the clients and up to the multicasters.
At this wavelength it's better to picture this as light, given that it reflec
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You could always do the research yourself, fund it, fund the prototype phase, ramp up the manufacturing facilities and then bribe the equipment manufacturers to immediately use your new hardware in their current product lines.
That sounds do-able. Would you be happy with that kind of immediacy?
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Except for the fact we have a working physical prototype here, apparently. Most of these "in a few years" never reach that stage.
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It isn't if you attach it to sharks. Then, instead, it's deadly.
do not look at shark with remaining eye (Score:2)
...it's more like a laser than a signal...
A laser is a signal
Any sufficiently powerful laser is a signal that you want something destroyed, Mr Bond.
Any insufficiently powerful laser can still make a amusing cat toy.
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No, a laser is a device for making a beam of coherent light.
A 'signal', OTOH is not a good word to describe a broadly propagated EM radiation, as opposed to a narrowly propagated one.
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Speed of light / 3*10^11 Hz = 1 mm wavelength, which should have no problem bypassing particles less than 0.5 mm in diameter.
By comparison, visible light is 400-700 nm [wikipedia.org], that's 4/10000 mm, so fog and rain that limit our field of vision should pose little to no problems for a 300GHZ wave.
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So basically wireless will eventually be like fibre ?