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Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads
- AdamTReineke 14y agoJust theoretical, no prototype yet. Seems a bit early to get excited.
- landypro 14y agoNow we need a storage medium capable of supporting those transfer speeds.
- S_A_P 14y agoIm sure graphene will be involved with that too ;)
- dhughes 14y agoYes the graphene covered DVD put in a LightScribe DVD drive made a supercapacitor I'm sure that knowledge may someone help in making better batteries (yes I know a capacitor isn't a battery). https://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.ful https://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.ful
- solistice 14y agoBut a battery is a capacitor. Well, technically not, but they behave similarily, with the battery storing more energy per cubic centimeter than the capacitor, at the trade off of having a much higher internal resistance. Also I believe he meant data storage, since we have battery technologies which would work for this application, even though more juice is always a juicy prospect.
- solistice 14y agoYou could save attempt to use some kind of parallel setup down to the silicon layer to achieve these data throughputs. [S R ][bit0]->[line 0] [H E ][bit1]->[line 1] [I G ][bit2]->[line 2] [F I ][bit3]->[line 3] [T STER...etc. It's late over here though, so I expect this design to have an obvious fatal flaw.
- short_circut 14y agoI find claims of such to be somewhat questionable. Even if we could enable Terabit speeds over wireless it does not good if the hardware receiving it is incapable of handling that much data in that short of time. I mean we get max hard drive write speeds of 3.0 GB/s for the average user. Ram and CPU are still on the order of Ghz. We may be able to cram that much in the air but it does no good if the computers can't handle it.
- joe_the_user 14y agoIt may be that kind of rate would wind-up only being useful within a chip or between closely spaced chips.
- hosh 14y agoYeah. But that is already incredibly useful. When assembling electronic components from a number of suppliers, you would not have to wire them up into a circuit board. You only need to physically put them close to each other and then configure them to talk to each other.
- joe_the_user 14y agoYes, I didn't mean to imply this use would be unimportant. This could be huge.
- ktsmith 14y agoSo should these researchers sit on their hands until such time as hardware capable of utilizing those transfer rates exist? The mathematical modeling here is at the very least useful in determining this is a path worth exploring with prototypes.
- freehunter 14y agoIt's a fair point. It's the same bottlenecking issue that plagues mobile devices. We can make multi-core and multi-ghz processors with giant, bright, high resolution displays, but we're having a hard time getting battery technology to keep up with this immense power draw. The good news is, with these restraints being placed on improvements in technology, it gives incentive to further invest in research to making better batteries or faster storage devices.
- zwieback 14y agoMake it a fractal graphene antenna and you've got next years funding locked up!
- oakwhiz 14y agoToo bad fractal antennas are patented. US Patent No. 6452553
- femto 14y agoOdd, given that the log-periodic antenna is fractal and invented around 50 years ago (1957 by Duhamel and Isbell?). I personally was working with such antennas in 1992. They're not called fractal, since their invention predates the invention of the work "fractal" in 1975, by Mandelbrot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-periodic_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-periodic_antenna --- Edit: The owners of the patent actually acknowledge the above in a FAQ on their site [2]. It's accompanied by an unconvincing justification for why they claim to own fractal antennas. [2] http://www.fractenna.com/nca_faq.html http://www.fractenna.com/nca_faq.html
- jacquesm 14y agoGraphene is quickly acquiring buzz-word status.
- asafira 14y agoAs a physics grad student, I wanted to mention that graphene _was_ a buzz-word a few years ago. It's popularity has since died significantly in the community. It's still around, but nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Maybe the same will happen in popular science?
- hosh 14y agoI remember John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe where the human electronic tech was based on microchip modules communicating to each other wirelessly. There are no wires. I just never expected to see people developing such technology a few years after I read that.
- nb13 14y agoWell, the article says they've only drawn up blueprints of how the technology could work so far. I hope they start actually developing this soon though.
- singingfish 14y agodoes anyone know of any commercially available products incorporating graphene yet?
- solistice 14y agoPencils. Well, layered graphene.
- ripperdoc 14y agoThis is indeed interesting, but I'd say far beyond the needs. 10Gbps wireless transfer already exists (e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/27/ntt-docomo-confirms-successful-10gbps-wireless-test/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/27/ntt-docomo-confirms-succe... ), and that is beyond what flash based memory can do. In any case, it would mean transferring a BluRay in something like 30 seconds, assuming you had a faster drive.
- JulianMorrison 14y agoWhat it would do is end the concept of "local storage". Online is faster.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoDon't be so quick. Don't just consider single link transfers, remember that wireless is always shared bandwidth. If you have a terabit for everyone that means you can have hundreds of megabits for tens of thousands of folks in a small area all connected to one access point / cell tower.
- trotsky 14y agoThey are talking about terahertz bands that aren't suitable for distance communication, the ranges are practically measured in centimeters.
- lutusp 14y ago> They are talking about terahertz bands that aren't suitable for distance communication, the ranges are practically measured in centimeters. If this argument had merit, light would be unsuitable for long-distance communication.
- trotsky 14y agoWater vapor in these bands is a strong absorber limiting distance in earth's atmosphere to ~10 meters or less. Subtract a good deal for omnidirectional emissions and decent snr.
- csours 14y agoI wonder how much spectrum it would stomp on? Or is it possible to increase bandwidth without using more spectrum? Better time resolution?
- InclinedPlane 14y agoNone. Transmissions in the terahertz range are currently not part of any FCC allocation (which maxes out at 300 GHz).