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Radar/Wireless Transmitter on a Chip
dganapa writes "Researchers at the California Institute of Technology, headed by Dr. Ali Hajimiri, have developed a low-cost radar system on a silicon chip. The entire system has been designed from the ground up on silicon, thus leading to reduced cost as well as robustness in response to design variations and changes in environment. The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet) and can soon lift wireless, high-frequency communication to a whole new level. The radar as such is not as powerful as a conventional radar but because of its cost-effectiveness, a number of them can be coupled together to perform really well. A related NY Times article is here. A recent article from Slashdot shows that radar technology is increasingly being implemented in the automobile industry. This current chip is sure to be much more successful than its predecessors as far as the automobile industry is concerned, but whether or not its processing speed will become important in the computer industry remains to be seen."
The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet)
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
Imagine a beowulf... oh nevermind. :)
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
(yes - of course we can disable it if we want to)
but wouldn't it be great to have the brakes applied if you lose attention for that one split second. Everyone I've known who has been in a car accident, (luckily they were minor) has said just that.
Unless you are James Bond, or just want to do some fancy driving a radar controlled braking system would be great.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Why can't I get my liquid nitrogen cooled 24 Ghz ahtlon64 then? I thought we weren't capable of making gates that would switch that fast?
Can someone clear up my confusion?
TODO: 753) write sig.
... and no I haven't read the article yet.
can an array of these be used to emulate a synthetic apreture radar, meaning that a flat panel gives you a 120 to 180 degree field of view from that panel?
Can the processing power of the chips be used to provide an improved image of what is reflecting in the spectrum the radar is working in? With a two dimensional array of 5 by 5 chips, distributed over a 1 foot by 1 foot surface, you could have a 3 dimensional "image" with a resolution similar to a human's 2 eyes. If the chips themselves can be programmed to do the interpolation, you could use a seprate computer to provide a opengl real time image of the world.
Perhaps I should read the article...
-Rusty
You never know...
This same technology could be used for low-cost RFID scanners. If manufacturers can bundle an entire RFID interrogator on a silicon chip, it would reduce scanner costs and accelerate RFID adoption. The low power of this silicon-based GHz RF would be acceptable in many RFID scanning applications.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
... having radar in your car. Just don't be surprised one the police finds a way to screw you over for a few more bucks by using passive radar to determine your speed.
Hate me!
* The chip could serve as the brains inside a robot capable of vacuuming your house. While such appliances now exist, a vacuum using Hajimiri's chip as its brain would clean without constantly bumping into everything, have the sense to stay out of your way, and never suck up the family cat.
Not really. The radar might reflect off the cat or your leg, but would pass right through wooden furniture and walls. A radar-equipped vacuum cleaner would still bump into stuff.
* A chip the size of a thumbnail could be placed on the roof of your house, replacing the bulky satellite dish or the cable connections for your DSL. Your picture could be sharper, and your downloads lightning fast.
Wrong on size. Satellite dishes are big to both help collect enough RF energy to get a clean signal and to pinpoint on a single satellite. Without the needed collecting area and beam-forming span of the antenna, the signal would be weak and overlaid with signals from other satellites in orbit.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Is the frequency band at 24 GHz actually licensed for automotive radar systems?
According to this press release it's not licensed in parts of Europe.
And in the US, there is only a temporary license.
I haven't found an unbiased summary yet - the referenced press release is from a working group of companies in the automotive industry.
This summary says that the frequence is reserved for radio astronomy and similar users.
This will make those radar detectors (used to detect police radars in speed traps) virtually useless. Once every car is equipped with a radar, these detectors will beep continuously.
Maybe they can be replaced with very sensitive tri-sensor devices that test for a specific combination of: doughnuts, coffee, and bacon.
If my early morning math is right the wave length of 24Ghz is about half an inch. Does that mean that the chip could distinguish distances as small as half an inch?
That would be really cool for a small robot if it could.
A related NY Times article is here.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
for those too lazy to register an account- here's the new york times article:
RADAR technology was once synonymous with the big and the bulky - for instance, the heavy, rotating antennas at the airport, scanning skies and runways. But lately radar, like so many other technologies, has been slimming down. Now a team of electrical engineers at the California Institute of Technology has shrunk the functions of a radar system into one tiny, intricately designed silicon chip and eight minuscule antennas. The basic building blocks of the radar system are all fully integrated on the chip, including power generation, signal processing, and dozens of other functions. The intricate parallel circuitry is designed so that the eight antennas can work together to focus and steer a beam of microwaves. Although the circuit design is highly complex, the silicon chip can be made in bulk using inexpensive lithographic methods, said Ali Hajimiri, an associate professor of electrical engineering who leads the group on high-speed integrated circuits that created the chip. "It should cost no more than a few dollars," he said. The high-frequency beams that the system generates and receives may one day handle many functions, including the usual radar jobs of ranging and location. In cars, for example, the chip might be used to detect other vehicles looming in the fog. The chip may also be used for wireless communications, since it has a broad bandwidth or range of frequencies at which it communicates. And it produces a bit stream at roughly the rate of fiber optics, more than enough for quick downloads of movies and other digital data. "D.S.L. can go to several hundred kilobits, and fiber can go to several gigabits per second," Dr. Hajimiri said. The radar chip can achieve bit rates up to a gigabit per second, partly because of the concentrated nature of the beam, he said. "The beam created by the chip is highly focused," he said. The chip could combine the functions of sensing and communication, say, for a group of army tanks that needs to stay in touch in the field. "Using these extremely high frequencies, you can first capture location, sending out pulses and scanning the area like a bat," said Volkan Ozguz, chief scientist at Irvine Sensors in Costa Mesa, Calif. Irvine Sensors makes miniature electronic systems, including sensors. "Then, using the same chipset, you can start communicating at high frequency," exchanging information without switching to different equipment, he said. The new radar chips do not create pulses as powerful as those now used in aviation systems, but they could be used in arrays to multiply their power, Dr. Hajimiri said. The eight antennas on the new chip are not the sort that protrude from old-fashioned rotating radar shells. Instead, the antennas - actually traces of metal on a PC board - do not move at all: their bearings are adjusted not mechanically but electrically by circuits that imitate the behavior of rotating antennas, focusing and steering the beam of radio signals in the right direction. Usually the radiated signals arrive at the separate antennas at different times. But electronic devices called phase shifters compensate for these delays, in effect combining and enhancing the collective power of the signal for a desired direction, and rejecting emissions from other directions. "It's neat because you can get the eight antennas to work together so that you can transmit in a narrow beam," said David B. Rutledge, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech and a colleague of Dr. Hajimiri. "Then you transmit with eight times as much power." The phased array antennas can be made insensitive to unwanted signals, limiting interference. "In cellphones, when you add people, there's interference," he said. "But these circuits can figure out how to reduce power from a direction they don't want." Dr. Hajimiri used a comparison between a light bulb and a laser pointer to explain how the chip could make the best use of its power. Light bulbs illuminate the whole space, he said, but a laser c
Just guessing: The radar signal is generated by a microwave oscillator formed by some kind of folded structure on the silicon. The structure must be folded because it must be at least one wavelength of the generated frequency. The wavelength of a 24 GigaHertz signal is:
(300,000,000 meters/second [the speed of light, approx.]) / (24,000,000,000 cycles/second [24 GHz]) = 0.0125 meters, or a wavelength of 1.25 centimeters.
In photos, the radar chips are shown to be less than 1.25 centimeters in width and length. That makes me guess that there is some folded resonant structure.
Does anyone know if that assumption is correct? Is it possible to generate a signal from a structure smaller than one wavelength?
One of the articles says that the maximum transmission speed is 1 GHz, so that is the maximum speed of any digital or analog circuitry. The governmentally designated band is 22 to 29 GigaHertz, so the theoretical maximum speed of data transmission is 7 Gigahertz, the width of the frequency band.
This is a major breakthrough. A large number of these chips can be combined with digital signal processing to make a radar that has an effective antenna size much larger than each chip. Large effective antenna sizes are also great for reliable directed data transmission.
The chip is neat, but the article is very heavy on the hype. The only new thing here is putting everything including the antenna on one chip.
And conventional radars do not cost "millions of dollars".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I found the NYTimes article dumbed things down a little too much. Basically, this is a press release by a fairly young professor about a ISSCC paper to be presented next week.
CMOS is getting fast enough (could be SiGe BiCMOS chip but probably CMOS) to allow for amplifiers and ADC (analog-to-digital) that work in the radar (~25GHz on up) range & also allows for million gate DSPs and digital logic on the same chip. The analog front-end is running around 24GHz which gives a 1/4 wavelength around 3mm (antennas are implemented as PCB traces off-chip). This is an analog GHz signal where the transistors are amplifying a tiny GHz signal using analog amplifiers. Digital clock speeds are completely different. Digital is like switching completely from off to on (ie. 0 to 5V -- in reality try 2V or 3.3V). This is like a uV signal being amplified to be later converted to a digital signal with a more reasonable bandwidth that a digital CPU could handle (like your overclocked Pentium).
The parallel analog antennas & blocks which allows for parallel ADC of 8 channels.. 8 parallel radar antennas. By using parallel processing you can use the information gained by the other channels to improve your ADC or have each channel only need to work at 1/8 of the total speed. Also, having 8 antennas allows phased arrays where you can control the beam and allows you to scan the beam or block out other signals (much like cell towers can focus in on one cell signal, and why your 802.11 router has two antennas). So, depending on how much bandwidth the ADCs need & how fast the DSP is running is really the 'digital' GHz part of the chip. So the digital processing is probably a more reasonable 100's of MHz (though hard to compare DSP speed to CPU speed). The processed digital waveform can be sent high-speed off chip, or to on-chip CPU to be used to disable your cruise-control and hit the brakes for you.
Why do you care? Well by using straight CMOS the radar system can be made on one chip and not need 'exotic' GaAs/SiGe/InP (BJTs of traditional radar systems) and when the automotive chips get down to sub-$5 they will show up in every car. Also doing it this way, much smaller power is involved and you don't need circuits that look like your microwave oven waveguides.
It really isn't that new or novel.. Just a PR Prof trying to toot his horn.
You bring up a very good point. With a simple radar detector, cops will be able to "see" you coming for miles. They'll probably legally have to using an active measuring system to "clock" you, but it can be completely automated, and they can nap in between suckers^H^H^H erm, taxpayers.
- The chip here is not "a major breakthrough".
- The system here can be easily accomplished with two or three chips today.
- The interesting thing here is a single CMOS chip implementation.
- The VCO is probably a DVCO (distributed voltage-controlled oscillator) [this aspect of the design might be considered a design major breakthrough].
- Things don't have to be "at least one wavelength".. In MMIC design you might care about 1/2 a wavelength... but regardless the antennas are off-chip anyways. And this isn't microstip / waveguide / co-planar design here.
- If you want a large effective antenna system, you can build it with more cost. The point here is automotive which means low-cost, high-volume.
I suppose the really tough part of anti-lock brakes or air-bags is 'creating the software'..
This is just another component like those two innovations. It's not intended to drive around like George Jetson.
Imagine placing these chips on top of light poles every 1/2 mile on big city highways. Now enable them to relay information to each other and broadcast it via Bluetooth or something like that.
In your car have a GPS map that has wireless capability to these units. You can get a real-time traffic density map of the city and decide if you want to take the freeway home or take another route...
Seems like a pretty easy app to set up also.
"In like 5 years they'll like have software that can download movies." Lars Ulrich, Metallica
Not to be paranoid here but doesn't all this extra stray RF concern anyone? It's been proven that excessive radar signal was the cause of excessive cancer rates in some state troopers. True, those radar guns might have been a *bit* more powerful than what's being described here. Maybe the total exposure is dangerous like the great George Carlin once said, "...but only when swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time."
It's not that I'm concerned so much about one or two of these things. It's the constant bombardment of excessive signal that I worry about. Should we be concerned? All I know is I don't want some guy in a white coat telling me 25 years from now that I have inoperable brain cancer due to radiation exposure coming off my toaster oven or some other appliance. That would kind of... Piss me off.
"Aw, HELL YEAH! I gots me a RADARR in my car, my vacuum cleaner... Sheeoot! Even my CAT got an RFID collar!"
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
As someone who volunteers at his car club's high-speed driver education events and has attended one of the events as a student- um, no.
First, braking is NOT always the best choice. When you're doing 60 and a moose jumps out in front of you, you STEER, not BRAKE. Why? Because under about 200 feet, you're never going to stop in time but you probably can change lanes. Simple physics tell you why- it's a lot easier to accelerate a car enough to move 10 feet to the side than it is to bring the whole thing to a stop.
Second, when said moose jumps out in front of you, steering while braking is exactly what causes many accidents, because you unbalance the car, shift a huge amount of weight to one corner tire, which becomes drastically deformed under the weight and becomes nearly useless; meanwhile, there's next to no weight on any of the other tires, and they're useless too. Your tires have what is called a "friction circle"; draw an X-Y axis, now a circle centered. That describes how much acceleration your tire can accomplish in any one direction. Notice that there's less of any one particular axis when you're doing both? Your tires always stop better when you're not trying to steer, and vise-versa. Both controls should ALWAYS remain under control of the driver so the system doesn't try to do something while you're doing something else.
Third, proper driver education is a lot cheaper(just one $200-300 event, depending on the club, will teach you quite a bit about how to handle your car properly) in the long run.
Your friends who have been in accidents need to analyze WHY they got into the accidents they did. I'm guessing an automatic braking system would not have "fixed" any of this, but better attentiveness, good judgment, and proper knowledge of how to handle their car would have.
Please help metamoderate.
This will be vitally important to the development of consumer robotics devices and the mitiuraization of existing devices. One of the big problems now with small robots is that they have limited choices for environmental perception. Ultrasound has a limited range and can easily be interfered with, Infared has the same limitations, and optics which is the ideal solution requires a large amount of processing for shape recognition. Ussing radar, longer range, lower interference sensing devices can/will be incorportated into robotic devices. Also, this is a huge boon for small remote controlled autonomous air vehicales, as it will allow them to have the sensing abilities of their larger cousins such as the predator. Whoo hoo!
It could be a component, but only one piece. The really tough part if creating the software that intelligently drives. There are so many oddball cases you have to deal with in driving that it will be a very long time before this is possible.
I don't think the goal is that loft at this point - we're talking about an aid for the (human) driver to see through fog.
Quoted from the first line of the article:
Imagine driving down a twisty mountain road on a dark foggy night. Visibility is near-zero, yet you still can see clearly. Not through your windshield, but via an image on a screen in front of you.
This would be nearly impossible to implement by radar alone, but this is a step towards it.
The problem, of course, is clutter. Fog, snow and rain all obscure your view through radar because of clutter and attenuation. Even with a very intelligent algorithm combining the skills of hundreds of experienced mariners, finding the sweet spot on the clutter and gain controls is difficult.
Another issue is "obstructions" which won't cause an echo at all - like the very big fall waiting for you on the other side of the missing guardrail.
Let's consider a worst-case scenario. It's raining. The gain and clutter are configured to give you a clear view of cars in front of you, guardrails, concrete obstructions, rocks, etc despite the driving rain.
A few minutes ago, a truck drove down the road and a forklift pallet of toilet paper fell off the truck. Do you think your radar is going to show you its echo? I think its relatively weak echo will be filtered out as clutter...
How about something more substantial, a big square rooftop HVAC unit sitting on the road, one of its four corners pointed directly at you? Even under the best possible circumstances, it's going to be very hard to get an echo off that, since there isn't a surface normal to the RF energy leaving your car...
Or a kid, wandering around the road. Daddy had an accident because he trusted too much in his automotive radar system, and has been hurt. The clutter on your own radar system is set high enough to obsure the echoes from the water droplets of the driving rainstorm. Now, what kind of echo are we going to get off a human being, considering that we're mostly water?
I've seen people on radar systems. You really don't see much, and I don't care whether it's X-band or S-band, a crappy little Furuno bought at the yacht club or a $200,000 interswitched Lloyds type-approved Racal-Decca ARPA radar used on an aircraft carrier. You're still not gonna see much of a target.
While I was designing radar video systems for Litton (before the tech collapse), we had constant reports that bridge crews were using the radar for navigation, rather than properly sighting, having crew on watch, and bringing the ship to a slow speed with due consideration of conditions.
The ship's captain probably has 20 years experience at sea, and is now in charge of a multi-million dollar vehicle with many lives on board. These are responsible, intelligent and experienced people. And they often take their radar's accuracy for granted.
How, then, are we going to get Joe Sixpack who currently thinks nothing of driving around in his SUV, cellphone planted to his ear, to understand that the radar image presented to him is NOT infallible? That it is, despite its ability to "see" through fog, snow and rain, actually less accurate than the human eye?
Hell, how are we even going to teach him to read the display? With several years of experience reading PPI radar displays, there's no way in hell that I would ever try to use it (or just a quadrant sweep) to drive a car. It's just not as intuitive as it would seem, and I can't even begin to imagine what sort of work would be required to try to create something like a TV picture of the road ahead.
First off, to scan the image, the transceiver's antenna would have to be scanned - physically moved around - at the same speed as the desired refresh rate of the
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This chip interests me most from the aspect of pulse generation. What sort of circuitry do they have on there that's capable of producing the high-power RF pulses? Have you ever seen the kinds of diodes they use on big military radars? Those things can conduct thousands of amps! They're gigantic. How the hell did they build such a pulsed power system onto an itty bitty chip (yeah, it's definitely smaller scale than the mega-diodes I've seen but it's still impressive).
I didn't see anything in the article that referred to power output - maybe I just missed it. But I think that there may be lots of applications where the kind of power you are thinking about isn.t needed, Military units need maximum range, and range is often hundreds of miles. But to spot another car in the fog all you need is a hundred yards or so.
And the beam-focusing aspect means that 100 mW can go a long way.
I was thinking that the communications aspect may be the big payoff, think what this would do for a cell-phone. No external antenna, and the comm beam always aimed in a direction other than the user's head. Cuts the radiation exposure by orders of magnitude. Of course you might not want to step in from of one...
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
This comes much too late for Intel and AMD. For the longest time, they had a clockspeed war, and now are in a stalemate.
This would be the perfect reason to boost clockspeed - if this chip is cheap, fast, and has low power consumption, it would be perfect for wireless networks. In fact, if this chip is as commodized as the article tends to imply, then depending on range it could make ad-hoc networks simple and easy.
But since it runs at 24 Ghz, even one stream would be too much for a standard server or one client PC to take advantage of fully. It would have to use some sort of buffering schema, IE, if you have a 2Ghz CPU dedicated on a server, then the card would hold the data until the CPU asks, then releases twelve times the data that the wireless chip put in the buffer at once.
Still, I don't think that they'd start marketing on that point again. Soon as they are fast enough for that killer app, they're in the same boat as before.
ONE Of these chips can. It's a phased array (aka synthetic aperature) radar on a single chip.
Probably. Researchers were doing this with hydrophones picking up background noise 5 years ago (sorry, I don't have a link, I read it in Scientific American)
There was a big thing in the mid-nineties about Micropower Impule Radar (MIR). Again this was just a kind of radar on a chip. It all sounded great but I recently read that the laboratory involved was being investigated for fraudulent claims. http://golhoeft.addr.com/mirrpt99.htm Lets hope this new work bears fruit.
I know everyone is excited about the chip that uses almost no power to act as a radar. However, unless they re-write a few laws of physics, I thought the range of a radio signal was dependent upon its power with a few other environmental factors thrown in. Did I miss something, or has no one stated the range of this device yet?
If they get the HW frequency high enough, couldn't they step it down in software to receive lower frequencies too, DSP the signal to filter for harmonics, and tune in any frequency in the entire band? Is this device the quantum leap to a cheap, tiny, single chip universal antenna?
--
make install -not war
After reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash a friend and I looked into how hard it would be to make something like the smart wheels on YT's board or on Hiro's bike. It really just came down to having a really accurate map of what was in front of you. So low power cheap accurate radar would be ideal. Of course you still need something that can pulse one of the spokes like 18/sec at just 60 miles an hour but hey why not...
Musik::Response
From David Syes
I think I coined this first: Body Aura-Mour...
Imagine this being used on soldiers' ensembles... you could wear a weapons system that tags friends' IFF transponders to reduce fratricided (accidental or intentional, to prevend fragging the 2/LT);
It could be used to locate and link up with allies, or to sneak up on unsuspecting targets in almost any kind of weather.
Moreover, it could help police and firefighters. Ever more frightening, school kids could me made to rent them and affix them to their uniforms. Now, roll call will have a whole, umm, new dimension.
But, it could also be used to help people avoid being horned when the bull races occur. But, I guess that would take the fun out of being rammed in the rear or the spine or gut.
BodySAR--- Body Synthetic Aperture Radar... Interesting applications...
Well, in about 15 years at least...
...At least 15 years in the USA to get all the juristictions on the same page. The way most people drive, this is like money in any Goverments bank that posts a speed limit.
To get a licenced vehicle it will have to have a similar chip in it, pointing at the ground below the car 2 feet from the cars edge. The car will report the speed to you and the cops. No high speed chases, just a ticket or summons in your mail box, maybe it will even triggar an auto-funds-debit (no pun intended.) Forget self driving daydreams, the reason we like to drive is autonomy (again no pun.) Even futuristicly, self driving is a luxury add-on, that this chip might only make slightly less cost prohibitive for general production. As part of an Auto's BlackBox/Lojack system this would be a very, very ecconomical inclusion.
Hmmm, I wonder how many snapshots a digital camera (or bank of cameras) would take in focus with this chip by its side? Entry ways, crowd scaning; can this chip be used in high speed facial reccognition systems?
If the ground is two feet away from you and approaching at speed, you're falling and about to die.
RADAR doesn't track "the speed" of an object, but actually only measures its distance (and we get the {relative} speed by calculating change in distance over time).
RADAR is probably going to have a hard time giving you the speed of what amounts to an infinitely large something which is a constant distance from you.
And while we're at it, because it's only tracking distance, and you're looking "at the ground, two feet ahead" anytime you approach a speedbump it'll "see something with rapidly decreasing distance", ditto when you crest a rise or drive through a ditch. So you'll get some ludicrously unbelievable false-readings (if you were merely calculating the speed).
Obviously these are not issues for most current/typical uses of RADAR. In an aircraft, anything approaching you rapidly is an issue, ditto where the RADAR from a fixed location.
Pointing RADAR at the ground from a few feet away is really quite pointless, if you haven't already realised it's there you've got bigger problems than knowing *exactly* how fast it's approaching you.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
"This current chip is sure to be much more successful than its predecessors as far as the automobile industry is concerned, but whether or not its processing speed will become important in the computer industry remains to be seen."
24GHz is an FCC assigned band for automoive radar. The processing speed isn't the issue since the radar signal is mixed down to extract the basesband info, which is processed at a much slower rate. 24 GHz is significant since phased array antennas at this frequency are getting small enough to put in car bumpers without being too ugly for the people who care about what it looks like.
Vote for Pedro
"The chip runs at a staggering speed of24 GHz (enabling it to transfer data as fast as the main network of the Internet) and can soon lift wireless, high-frequency communication to a whole new level."
24GHz is the carrier frequency of the radar. The amount of information in a signal is related to the bandwidth of the signal, as well as linearity and noise. This design was done in SIGe BiCMOS, which is more than capable of designing a wireless tranceiver at 24Ghz RF frequency. The phased-array signals are mixed down to baseband and probably converted to digital, at which point a DSP chip would then process the information in the signals at a much lower clock frequency using standard CMOS.
Vote for Pedro
Okay, but what is the tuned circuit on the output? There are no "LC tanks" at 24 GHz, right?
I am not smart enough to fully appreciate all of the applications that a chip of this nature could perform but after reading the article, I am still wondering what it really is? Is it something akin to the "one chip calculator" that launched the personal computer revolution - a multi-function device that is versitile enough to do many jobs well? Or is it closer to a GPS on a chip - a device that does one job and does it well - that can be interfaced with other components to do a wide variety of tasks?
I'm not going to argue the physics or the legalities. I suspect that the physics are well covered by the professor's work (but not by the press release) and I suspect that the legalities will be addressed but somewhat slowly.
I've seen what radars were like and what they are like today. Things have really changed by integrating GPS, mapping, and radar and integrating the result on an LCD display. Products like this are still kind of expensive but available for recreational boaters who have a few thousand for them.
I can see how this technology, in a "dummed down, cost reduced format" could be integrated into cars and used as a driver's aid (ala On-Star). I can see how it could be "militarized" and used on the battle field and, I can see how it's phased array could be used to direct a wireless signal to specific devices for high-bandwidth data transfer. If it can be produced cheaply enough I'm sure there are thousands of potential uses that nobody has thought of yet.
Frankly, the announcement kind of nags at me for the lack of information that it contains. The more I think about it, I'm gonna drop it into the vaporware category until I see the first products on the market using this technology. There are many hurdles to cross before it goes commercial. I'm suspecting that this is more "pure research" than "applied research." In short, I am not holding my breath. I expect the practical applications that may come from this are still a long way down the road.
2. Many cops will just outright lie to write a ticket.
I am about to send a letter to the court about a ticket I received 2 weeks ago, and have already paid.
I believe that the primary purpose of our traffic laws is to make every driver into a criminal. The officer wrote me a "Disregarding the Signs" ticket which costs money, but does not affect my license. If he felt I was a dangerous driver, he should have written the ticket to reduce my ability to drive, or to force me to take driving classes. His performance showed that his true purpose was literally highway robbery.
If you travel in eastern PA, please remember that the areas around the Turnpike exit for Morgantown, and Route 422 on the east side of Reading are popular places for ambushes by the local police. The ambushes are usually at night in areas where if you did go off the road at twice the speed limit, you would travel almost 100 feet before meeting a tree.
The Valley Forge Turnpike exit leads to the King of Prussia mall. The local police like to give tickets on the roads around the mall. They do not patrol the rest of the town. There have been 3 hit-and-runs damaging cars in front of my house in the last 2 years. My car was damaged in one of them; the paint left on my car was a distintive green, and enough silver paint was gone from my car that some must have been on the other car. The police's only assistance was to offer to write a report for my insurance claim. (Another police officer stated that posting a message to the nearby bodyshops was standard procedure in his town.)
Here is my letter:
--- Letter
Please send the officer who wrote me a ticket to classes in observation and public safety.
The following happened on Route 10 South between the ramp from I176 and the light at Route 23.
The officer told me that I "almost hit that other vehicle". That is his phrase for safely coming to a stop about three feet behind a truck that had parked in the middle of the exit ramp. He was aware the other vehicle had stopped unsafely while there were plenty of places to pull off the road, but did nothing about it.
The officer told me I was speeding, and following too closely. The distance between my car and the truck constantly increased until there were more than 6 car lengths between us when the truck's brake lights lit to stop at the red light. (I was under the previous traffic light and the truck was about halfway between the two lights if someone needs to measure.) The truck must have been travelling faster than my vehicle (or physics dictates that I would have hit it.)
The officer told me the speed limit was 35 mph. The posted speed limit sign states 45 mph. Please correct whichever is wrong.
The officer said that I did not come to a complete stop at the red light at Route 23. I came to a complete stop. I checked for a "No Turn on Red" sign. Then I turned my head to check for traffic. My car has a manual transmission, and I did not put it into first gear until after I checked for traffic. All this took at least the two seconds required by state law. If the law is different in your district, then it should be posted.
When I arrived at my friend's house about 2 blocks from where I was pulled over, their first remark was that one of my headlights was out. The officer made no mention of this, even though it is a safety issue.
Every statement the officer said was false. If he was concerned with safety, he would have pulled over the truck that stopped in the middle of the exit ramp. If he was concerned with speeding, he would have pulled over the truck as the fastest moving vehicle. You decide the motivation behind his actions, and whether he should remain a member of your police force.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.