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Record High Frequency Achieved

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the music-to-their-ears dept.

eldavojohn writes "Researchers at UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science managed to push our control of frequencies to another level when they hit a submillimeter 324 gigahertz frequency. As any signal geek out there might tell you, this is a non-trivial task. 'With traditional 90-nanometer CMOS circuit approaches, it is virtually impossible to generate usable submillimeter signals with a frequency higher than about 190 GHz. That's because conventional oscillator circuits are nonlinear systems in which increases in frequency are accompanied by a corresponding loss in gain or efficiency and an increase in noise, making them unsuitable for practical applications.' The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into."

15 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

    The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into

    Like making your dog's head explode.

    1. Re:In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 5, Funny

      The article also talks about the surprising applications this new technology may evolve into

      Like making your dog's head explode.

      The article talks about the military being interested in acquiring the technology so they can see through peoples clothes, and that was the best you could come up with?

      That's weak.

      --
      -1 Uncomfortable Truth
    2. Re:In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Because the wavelength is submillimeter, you may image through people's clothing," Chang said. "For example, it would be possible to remotely view if some civilian walking up to you has plastic explosives hidden under his coat."
      Yah. I know that's what I'd use that technology for.
      --
      No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    3. Re:In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by eln · · Score: 4, Funny

      Whoa whoa whoa, slow down...Slashdot submissions have articles now? I only started reading the summaries last week!

    4. Re:In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Bah, just give them a few drinks and you'll get all of their clothes off the old fashioned way.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    5. Re:In other news, dogs in the area go berserk by s_p_oneil · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What site do you think you're on? This is Slashdot, where most of the submitters can't even get a girl to accept a drink. ;-)

  2. Nooo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Think of the bees :p

    1. Re:Nooo! by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or worse, the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

  3. Hardly the highest frequency! by oskay · · Score: 5, Informative

    Precision phase coherent control of lasers has become possible in the last ten years- Laser beams at frequencies exceeding 1 PHz (10^15 Hz) have been precisely controlled, phase locked, and tuned to have frequencies that are *exact multiples* of our best microwave frequency standards (e.g, cesium). It works the other way too-- our most precise microwave-frequency signals come from divided-down optical frequency references now! See also: 2005 nobel in physics.

    1. Re:Hardly the highest frequency! by niro5 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I agree, my girlfriend reached a far greater frequency when she found a spider in the bath tub. Old news.

    2. Re:Hardly the highest frequency! by insignificant1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, people have achieved higher frequencies, and controlled them very precisely, as you point out; however, such oscillators aren't CMOS oscillators. That's the news, that they've built a CMOS oscillator at such a frequency, not that they have achieved the highest frequency ever to be controlled (which would be a joke). Not exactly what the /. headline implies, though.

    3. Re:Hardly the highest frequency! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I was able to get your girlfriend to emit some fairly high frequencies also, and it had nothing to do with a spider.

    4. Re:Hardly the highest frequency! by oskay · · Score: 4, Informative
      The work with the CMOS circuits is clearly an important achievement.

      However, both the Slashdot title ("Record High Frequency Achieved") and summary ("...managed to push our control of frequencies to another level ...") do seem imply that frequency control has not been possible at frequencies that high before. So, it's important to point out that while it's a record, it's only a record within context. (Records within context are fun; you can do anything with them. For example, I hold the bicycle land speed record for all persons with my SSN.)

      In any case, it's *not* totally different. Both are examples of frequency control, which is it's own discipline that spans precision timing and applications in all frequency ranges, from RF (on chips and in free space) to optical (on chips, in fibers, and in free space) and beyond.

  4. Re:How they did it by ToxikFetus · · Score: 5, Informative

    The researchers first generated a voltage-controlled CMOS oscillator, or CMOS VCO, operating at a fundamental frequency of 81GHz with phase-shifted outputs at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees, respectively. By linearly superimposing these four (or quadruple) rectified phase-shifted outputs in real time, they ultimately generated a waveform with a resultant oscillation frequency that is four times the fundamental frequency, or 324 GHz.

    This sounds a lot like a phased-lock loop. And yes, from the article, it appears as though this does have pretty good scalability. TFA said 600 GHz is achievable. 324 GHz a nice because fog is transparent at that frequency.
  5. Re:How they did it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "TFA said 600 GHz is achievable. 324 GHz a nice because fog is transparent at that frequency."

    So in twenty years time cars will have an anti-fog display on the windscreen (which will have the ability to switch between transparent and display mode), which will make travelling through fog much safer at high speeds (let's just accept that cars will not have an auto-drive mode by then, eh?).

    On the downside, many crashes will occur because pedestrians on the sidewalk will appear to be naked! Perverts will be making the school run even worse as they hang around outside schools. And we'll all accept it as the price to pay for safety and anti-terrorism requirements.