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"GiFi" — Short-Range, 5-Gbps Wireless For $10/Chip
mickq writes "The Age reports that Melbourne scientists have built and demonstrated tiny CMOS chips, 5 mm per side, that can transmit 5 Gbps over short distances — about 10 m. The chip features a tiny 1-mm antenna, a power amp that is only a few microns wide, and power consumption of only 2 W. 'GiFi' appears set to revolutionize short-distance data transmission, and transmits in the relatively uncrowded 60GHz range. Best of all, the chip is only about a year away from public release, and will only cost around US $9.20 to produce."
"Best of all, the chip is only about a year away from public release, and will only cost around US $9.20 to produce"
To translate: This is vaporware, it may never be released in our lifetime, it may never actually work, and I have no fricken clue as to what it will actually cost.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I don't think so.
The dimensions that are discussed are unrealistic when considering heat dissipation let alone power conduction at that scale.
Further, it is a far cry from ideal lab results to real world conditions with the myriad of problems facing super high frequency technology!
I smell a rain dance - a promotional announcement to attract financial angels.
Ed
Typically, these types of networks measure power consumption in mW, not W.
Walls? Forget about it. This is 60GHz your talking about. Good luck getting it out of the case you put the chip in let alone through a wall, your body, or too much oxygen.
It consumes two watts of power. It is not a Bluetooth replacement. Using my phone for comparison: 1100mAh 3.7 V 3.7V / 2W = 1.85 A 1.1 Ah / 1.85 A = 0.59 Hours = approx. 36 Minutes. I know it won't be transmitting the whole time, but essentially this will be useless in a mobile application.
That said, what else would it really replace or be used in?
Short-range wireless video transmission, for one. From your IPTV box to your TV(s).
Case in point: at home, we just ditched cable and DSL and switched to an optic fibre triple-play (internet/IP TV/telephone) offer, which is much cheaper. For technical reasons the main receiver box can only be located near our entrance door, while the TV sits at the other side of the house.
Out of three possible solutions, none work well:
-laying an ethernet cable in the ceiling is possible, but a headache
-IP over the power lines is unreliable
-WiFi, regardless of the flavor, doesn't provide enough bandwidth (keep in mind that the box streams several HDTV channels at once, for instance when recording one while watching another)
So in our case, the proposed chip and protocol sounds ideal. 10m doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more than enough to cover most apartments / houses, and I expect it will be possible to get signal at much greater distances, with degraded signal. 2.5Gbps over 20m, wirelessly, would rock.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
I've been working on a totally wireless monitor for years, and I've almost got the solution - details here.
To make it the most efficient, I use a directed beam of energy. I also pre-convert that energy to photons before sending it, so that the monitor won't have to waste energy doing the conversion. I also pre-modulate the signal spatially so that I only send the energy needed -- again, another win for efficiency.
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