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NIST Unveils Chip-scale Atomic Clock
grumling writes "The heart of a minuscule atomic clock, believed to be 100 times smaller than any other atomic clock has been demonstrated by scientists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), opening the door to atomically precise timekeeping in portable, battery-powered devices for secure wireless communications, more precise navigation and other applications. "
especially when you're trying to get first psot
opening the door to atomically precise timekeeping in portable, battery-powered devices for secure wireless communications, more precise navigation and...
Video games!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yeah, so I can keep time 5 minutes early more precisely than ever before...
I want an atomic clock on my wrist.
And that doesn't mean that I don't find this atomic clock thingie absolutely fascinating ...
[Looking at strange spot on the wall]
What was I talking about?
... so my clock doesn't drift by like five minutes a day, necessitating a daily ping to the USNO time servers? anyone?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
> I want an atomic clock on my wrist.
Wouldn't it radioactivate you or something???
...Netgear can start manufacturing routers that don't totally fuck the NTP server at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Hey, this time it was funny!
GPS.
With a atomic clock in a GPS you no longer need to solve for time, so you can get the same quality position with one less satellite. There are times where this could make a huge difference.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
...has finally been unleashed! Home users will be able to measure the relativistic effects of using table saws and ice makers.
Can this be used to sync the AGC simulator so you don't have to reset the clock every day?
Surely if atomic clocks get smaller they'll have to become quark clocks?
Half of new york was contaminated by what was throught to be a dirty bomb but was later confirmed to be a small explosive attached to a truck load of atomic watches!
Actually, by definition, something atomic is very small.
But it's only natural that this becomes smaller. Give the rich part of the world ten years, and we're all spending our time wearing atomic _and_ digital watches.
Interestingly, this could affect our lifestyle. The more synchronized timepieces become, doing stuff in sync and on time gets more feasible. But that also lowers the acceptance for being late and inaccurate. And I know that I always come a few minutes late to every appointment.
Will people start yelling at me for coming only seconds late? Will the unspoken five-minute courtesy time ("the meeting starts at 2pm" really means "2:05pm") disappear? Will I become more stressful because of all this accuracy?
So, while this seems to be a step forward for mankind, it does not necessarily create more happiness. Just like an entire host of new inventions.
What bothers me with this is that it is not really useful in a wristwatch (Yes I know - they aren't making it for wristwatches yet - but just wait!). But because everyone else has one, I'll be forced to get one as well. Just like the cellular phone. And then it starts affecting my life. Scary.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
Netgear's problem wasn't lack of technological tools - it was lack of thought when they were designing those routers.
Extra hardware tools can't fix that, I'm afraid. There was one hardware tool that would have _helped_, which would have been flash memory for storing the firmware, so that the attacking routers could have been upgraded. But when you're trying to design a device for $50 retail, you don't have much headroom for buying more flash or atomic clocks or whatever. DNS would have been a much more useful tool, of course, and it already existed at the time they hardwired in the IP address.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Not small. indivisible.
Just wait till terrorists get their hands on one of these! Way to go scientist guys. Somebody call John Ashcroft.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've always imagined that the proliferation of wireless communications would eventually replace the need for having any sort of portable timing devices... I mean, my computer updates its clock from some atomic NTP server. A wifi clock could do the same.
Why carry an atomic clock, when you can talk to an even more accurate atomic clock, through the air? Although I guess the few ms of lag between the request and response might introduce too much error for some applications?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
I mean, if every device has its own atomic clock, the only time you'd have to synchronize them would be when you bring them up, unless you were doing some kind of scientific work that requires ultra-accurate timekeeping. Most other applications (I'm thinking Kerberos, remote logging, etc) would only need to be synchronized to the second (or even less) to be useful.
...doom! Doom! DOOM! DOOM!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
My atomic watch was affected by a previously unknown subspace anomaly, a Lewinsky, Saturday night.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
My Samsung SPH-A460 cell phone only shows the time when it can get a cellular signal. There's also a host of additional phone book software design flaws that make it less useful than my previous, archaic green-and-black phone. Here's to hoping this makes it easier for developers to easily integrate essential functionality into their products.
It matters not just for navigation although that is the first time I really noticed how accurate time was getting easier and easier.
Back in the seventies, our boss showed a video about him sailing across the Atlantic on a small sailboat. There was a shot in the cabin showing his digital watch (a new thing then) swinging back and forth. He pointed that out and said, "That's our chronometer." So at that point you could have the equivalent of a ship's chronometer (worth thousands) for less than a hundred bucks! I'm not even sure if a ship's chronometer would have worked on a small boat that rocked back and forth that violently.
As atomic clocks became generally available, they enabled faster communications because it was no longer necessary to send as much clock information along with the signal.
Thus far, cheaper accurate time has enabled us to do things that we couldn't before. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to guess what that would be this time.
Actually, by definition, something funny is very hard to understand.
This device will be excellent for Global Positioning Systems.
GPS works like this:
every GPS satellite has an atomic clock, your GPS reciver calculates all the difforences in time and position of the GPS satellites, and based on knowing the distance from each satellite, is able to calculate where you are. Currently, GPS recievers have Quartz clocks that are constantly kept snycrenized by the attomic clocks in the satellites.
now quartz clock accuracy is nowhere near attomic clock accuracy, so this will make GPS recievers much more accurate. Even though GPS accuracy is already better than 10 feet/3 meters
Your atomic watch may have the correct time down to the nanosecond, but after driving around with it, or flying in an airplane, or whatnot, the change in velocity will make it de-synch with other atomic clocks that were once synchronized with yours. I think I'll stick with my quartz wrist watch, which probably starts fixing its loss of time when I travel.....
It's the users not upgrading the routers that is the problem. I have one myself and it's upgraded- and not hammering those NTP servers.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Not only video games. I don't know when, I don't know how, but I am sure that eventually one day someone will somehow use is for pornography...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
That's a very good way of getting blocked at firewall level. It's rather stupid too, since if you need so much precision just use NTP instead.
It is a wrong use of ntpdate as well. Its point is to set the time to the correct one at startup, since ntpd only makes gradual corrections and won't make time go backwards for example to avoid breaking things.
So, configure ntpdate to run once at boot, then start ntpd to keep it in sync.
Most of the time that is true but in this case, an atomic clock has a very precise meaning in scientific instruments. It is a clock that counts the vibrations of atoms to determine time intervals. Accoring to SI units a second is
Up until now atomic clocks like the ones used by NIST were large pieces of equipment. They were highly accurate but not very portable. Before, merchanical watches would lose seconds a day. With the use of quartz in electronic watches that dropped to about a second every 2 months. This lowers that bar even further. I'm not sure for what that level of precision could be used.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When can I buy a netgear networkable home atomic clock box? Plug it in to your network, and use it to update the times on all your systems, instead of pinging NTP servers.
Or put it on a pci card, I can just put it in my router box.
Cell phone with web surfing: $150
Unlimited web surfing option on cell plan: $10/month
Cell phone with atomic clock and web surfing (future): $200
The ability to snipe someone on eBay for that powder blue Elvis jumpsuit: priceless
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apart from gravitational effects and velocity effects of course. You have heard of relativity haven't you?
If you run a full NTP client on your PC, it will compensate for the drift caused by the el cheapo crystal oscillator. By characterizing the drift, it can correct for it, even if you don't have a permanent or reliable Internet connection. It's like a software version of the trimmer capacitor that is used to adjust the frequency of a crystal oscillator.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That's the missing component in ones home-built cruise missile..
"pinpoint accuracy"
Now everyone can have one in their back yard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now we can be seven minutes to nuclear midnight where ever we go.
You have to sync atomic clocks every time you move them around a good deal (notebooks/portables); plus if you want a fairly reliable stratum-1 timeserver now, you can use GPS, for which you can buy a reasonable OEM receiver for about $50.
Since atomic clocks can be used to measure effects of gravity, it would be interesting to see how mass producing atomic clock chips could be used to create maps of gravity, seeing how they can be used to reveal geological information.
this would be useful in games methinks, afterall pokemon gold/silver/etc have those in game clocks that are just great (so what, its pokemon)
but cmon, wouldnt you like to see awsome features like that in more games? gameplay changing due to time of day?
Ok, not computed on your wrist, but still...
Stauer EMC2 Analog Atomic Watch
First Atomic Clock Wristwatch
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I thought one of the remaining large error factors in civilian GPS systems was the variable ionospheric delay. That's why the military version uses two frequencies, so they can measure and compensate for the ionospheric delay. The civilian version just uses a constant.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
people will be able to have VCRs that show the correct time...
This sounds amazing. IANA astrophysicist but it seems amateurs could do some real very long baseline interferometry with these things like the VLBA does.
..what?
It also puts military-level technology again into public hands, this seems pretty dangerous - high school kids's satellites could enable terrorist missile navigation.. oh well I guess this is inevitable.
Perhaps someone experienced could provide some input into the kinds of things this would make possible?
I'm wondering if it would enable:
- distributed seti, heck distributed lots of things.. monitoring of airspace anyone?
- precise geolocation similarly for vlba? If you can shoot the sun and have a compass, should be able to solve for own location?
- distributed measurement of environment for atmospheric simulations i.e. on ships at sea to gather wind vectors?
- high-efficiency use of wireless spectrum, maybe also data transmission in noisy environments?
from the faq, "atoms are also excellent sensors". Would this enable:
- teraherz scanners (well maybe it isn't that fast, only 9 GHz) and doppler analyzers
- portable detectors of acceleration, gravity, relativistic effects, sonar,
- also one manufacturer I remember had a very interesting application of very short radio pulses that could be used to make virtual barriers I think the military was interested in it.. Until there page was taken down..
Also I'm intrigued by the latest computer graphics research into structured light and recording of light fields with distributed cameras. It would seem that an audience with a lot of handycams and these chips could be producing an extremely interesting record of say a sporting event. A camera with a few of these chips might be quite useful.
What kind of things would be possible with off the shelf hardware and a couple of these chips?
Would these enable casual interferometry in day or night?
On the downside I saw a $10 spam sandwich by Dean and Deluca in their Shibuya Station (Tokyo) store yesterday. So some people can already make enough trouble without advanced technology perhaps. Still, the ultimate geek toy? (not the spam.. the clock)
All the posts I have seen have mentioned PCs and GPS... but this will really find its usefulness in military applications
it would be nice not to have to worry about the time drifting in radios.
> It is a wrong use of ntpdate as well. Its point is
> to set the time to the correct one at startup
This is only true if you have a permanent network connection. Most of us dial out only a couple of times a day, with no connectivity the rest of the time, so running ntpd is utterly pointless. Broadband arrogance rides again!
"It also puts military-level technology again into public hands, this seems pretty dangerous - high school kids's satellites could enable terrorist missile navigation.. oh well I guess this is inevitable."
Gee what do you know? The essense of man, can't keep up with the products of man. Just imagine what happens to a society that can't keep up with the fruits of technical progress. BOOM!
Her: Hey, that's a cool watch!
Him: No babe; it's not just cool. It is a nuclear powered watch; the most powerful watch in the business!
Her: Uhh... So you're a mutant?
i don't know about you. but on my network, 1 second delay in clocks screw things up.
:\ those are usually unresolvable, unless you get a lot of report for the same problem from different network (so you can cross correlate them)
when trying to track down a problem on multiple busy server, 1 second is at least twice (most likely more) as much data as you would need
a 1 second delay in synchronisation between your web application and a TV show is a LONG time (it's for interactive tv. we have to synchronise with the ads, the questions asked in the show, pauses, etc..)
of course the biggest problem is when dealing with multi networks problems. i don't count the number of reports i've had from server with misconfigured time and timezone informations
How amazingly primitive of you.
I've been keeping an eye on this project for a couple of years. Nice to see they've finally got something to demonstrate.
At 75 mA, it's still going to draw too much power to be useful in a wrist watch. I'm going to have to settle for my WWVB-synchronized Casio for now.
While wristwatches aren't a big concern, you've got to remember that these things can't keep time if they're not powered. You could have a system clock on an isolated computer that actually keeps time accurately, but it's going to need a pretty big battery if you're going to have it shut off for long.
Still, this'll be extremely cool for things like GPS and RF communications.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Hmmm....
So what time is it, really?
They're actually fitted into all RFID tags as a redundant "security measure."
All the [published] papers are here in PDF form.
The one thing I can't figure out is how they make a resonant cavity this small
Others have been asking what's the use as one of their papers says:
If you know the time precisely you can lock up to the long frame encoded GPS signal without needing CA (more vulnerable to jamming).
The story claims that this device pulls 75 mw and that it can be run on batteries. Assuming a 3V system, that's 25 mA of current. If one if these was in a typical portable device with a 750 mAH battery, it would last for 30 hours. Less, of course, if you actually turned on the device. Basically your battery would go dead in a day or so even with the device turned off.
For reference, real time clock chips that are used in portable electronic devices today pull about 3 microwatts of current -- almost 10,000 times less than this device.
...A lifeclock flower implanted in the palm of our left hand.
Worst. Troll. Ever.
P.S. you might want to lose the purported academic credentials in your future attempts though.
Not likely. First of all, this is thousands of times less accurate than a full-sized atomic clock, so your clock will drift out of sync gradually.
Even with full-sized atomic clocks, you rarely depend on any one of them to be 100% accurate, rather, they check between a pool of them, just in case one is slightly off, so it's not hard to imagine that maybe your atomic clock could loose a second here and there.
So, let's say that this makes it necessary to sync up less often. Well, that's assuming a lot. You see, typical quartz watches are more accurate than computers for a lot of reasons. Just because this is more accurate than quartz doesn't mean it will result in a computer clock that is any more accurate.
So, no, this won't be the end of NTP. Low-cost GPS recievers, now that might cause the end of NTP, or at least a decimation of NTP traffic...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I just had John Titor deja vu.
I am trying to buy a casio watch that it is only available in Japan for a couple of months. I have no idea when Casio will release it USA. Only ugly atomic and solar watchs are available in USA. The model of the watch is WVA-500TDJ-9AJF. A picture can be found at http://www.ari-web.com/shop/watch/waveceptor/L/wva -500tdj-9a.htm. That is not the only colour available. I don't know Japanese. Can anyone help please?
Any NT based Windows already has the ability to get the time using NTP without resorting to 3rd party apps, some of which are spyware. All you have to do is set a timeserver at the command prompt (I'm out of state, so I don't have my little sheet with how to do it. Sorry.) Then you start the network time service. I think XP even lets you do it in the date and time control panel.
Hey, can one of you guys sell me an atomic battery for my new watch :).
The only way I am going to buy an atomic watch is if it has a button that makes the atomic watch double over as an atomic bomb. Then I'd be like James Bond! Andy by the way.... [Homer], "Nucular. It's pronouced, 'Nucular'"
Maybe like pure timing-based protocols for communicating over the net?
Depending on the variability in routing causing different timing delays, I would imagine you could get a fair bit of information across two points without communicating anything that doesn't look like attempted gibberish over IP.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
We use a crystal clock in geophysical equipment whose drift is on the order of 1 part in 10^11 if I have my numbers right. That's about an order of magnitude better than the atomic clock. However, this clock is ovenized (maintained at a constant 70 degrees C) and that helps greatly. I wonder if you can boost the accuracy of the atomic clock in a similar fashion?