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. "

Comments

This had to come

[say]

After all, an atomic timekeeper is just that: atomic. It only needs to measure the radiation of a cesium atom. So the core of the clock is simple to make. All the measuring equipment, OTOH, has been huge.

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.

Does wifi/cellular marginalize this?

[theluckyleper]

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?

NTP

[Detritus]

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.

Re:Great for GPS

[LiquidCoooled]

There will ALWAYS be a need for an outside reference time source.

Whilst the device will keep track of time with an accuracy of 1 second in 300 years, what it can't do is keep time without power.

The effect means a video recorder still shows 00:00, just a lot more accurately than before.

Re:At last...

[haruchai]

How did this get modded up so highly? Yes, it was a boneheaded decision by Netgear engineers to hardcode an NTP server address but they did work with the University and release a firmware fix in a respectable timeframe.
Unfortunately, without a way to force an upgrade, the NTP flooding may continue for years. The real lesson here, which in this day and age should be second nature, is that HARDCODING is BAD!!
Especially, hardcoding ONE source that will be used by hundreds of thousands of clients.
The engineer(s) responsible should have been bitchslapped once per second for every flawed router.

Portable Interferometers, light field recorders?

[mattr]

This sounds amazing. IANA astrophysicist but it seems amateurs could do some real very long baseline interferometry with these things like the VLBA does.

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, ..what?
- 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)

Battery operated? Not likely.

[unix_hacker]

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.

Re:Not everybody has permanent connection!

[drinkypoo]

If these chips get cheap then every ISP will be able to run its own time server, routers will start coming with them, et cetera. In fact I find it highly likely that they will even replace the real time clock circuit on high end motherboards, it would be an extremely desirable piece of functionality on a server board, along with an embedded watchdog timer.