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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."
How do you pronounce Gi-Fi? "guy-fie"? "giffy"? "jiffy"?
If you use the proprietary GiFi protocol you may end up getting into patent trouble.
We should create our own standard which does what we need and is not covered by existing patents.
I suggest we call this protocol PnGi.
liqbase
I believe BlueTooth's max transmission rate is 2.1 Mb/sec (for BlueTooth 2.0). 5 Gb/sec > 2.1 Mb/sec.
USB 1.1 adapters are pretty cheap, too...how much are they being used today?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
And this is different from these others... how exactly?
http://www.vubiq.com/news.php
http://gigaom.com/2008/02/20/60-ghz60-second-hd-movie-downloads/
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/RF/ogre_project/
Wow, do we ever abuse these words.
:-P
From "Hi-Fi" (High Fidelity) to "Wi-Fi" (Wireless, but the Fi sounds cool and people vaguely know what you mean) to "GiFi" as gigabit wireless, you've basically lost the actual underlying words.
It almost seems like the whole "Fi" part is now just generally meaning "technology thingy".
So, is a baker PieFi? A politician LieFi? Someone, please, stop the madness.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This thing does so much, that if anything can get me a date, this chip can.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"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.
There's already a gay internet cafe near my house called Guy-Fi, and I think they're gonna be pissed.
Not a bad idea. But I wonder how much at 10 m is affected by walls. I also wonder how much it's affected by interference from cordless phones and other wireless devices. Usually when they say the range is 10m, the actual usable distance is half that, and only when there's no walls.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
True, but all USB 1.1 gizmos are backwards compatible with USB 2.0, and this is hardly backwards compatible with Bluetooth.
In this case you have a totally different standard that appears to be competing not so much in the PAN area but in the wireless-USB area, and in that respect I see it competing with UWB and WUSB. However, WUSB is only 480 Mbits per second...
That said, at the moment, WUSB seems to be a solution looking for a problem; which leads back to my original issue. Where is this going to come in handy at this price point? Nobody's going to pay upwards of $35 for a glorified USB cable.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
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!
At this data rate, this appears to be not so much competing with the keyboard/mouse/printer USB connector than it does the DVI video connector. Now all we need is some of Tesla's magic to transmit the electricity wirelessly and we're home free.
E pluribus unum
So if local coffee shops offer internet access with one of these, they can advertise that they have wireless G-spots!
/* No Comment */
It's basic RF. The higher the frequency, the worse the penetration. 700MHz and 900MHz go through just about everything (except dirt and metal). 2.4GHz (802.11b/g) can go through wood panels, drywall, and some forms of metal (not many). I don't know what the mathematical description is for the ratio of frequency vs rates of absorption/penetration, but it gets pretty bad at about 5.8GHz (802.11a). I can't imagine what it is at 60GHz and only 2W of output power.
Linky
"Indoor wave propagation is also affected by the building material. The density of the materials used in the construction of a building determines the number of walls the RF signal can pass through and still maintain adequate coverage. Paper and vinyl walls have little effect on signal penetration. Solid walls, solid floors and pre-cast concrete walls can limit signal penetration to one or two walls without degrading coverage. This can vary widely based any steel reinforcing within the concrete. Concrete and concrete block walls can limit signal penetration to three or four walls. Wood or drywall typically allows for adequate penetration of five or six walls. A thick metal wall causes signals to reflect off, which results in poor penetration. Steel reinforced concrete flooring restricts coverage between floors to perhaps one or two floors.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength is. Shorter wavelengths have more probability to get absorbed and distorted by a building material. Therefore, 802.11a, which operates in a higher frequency band, is more prone to the building material effect."
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -Anon.
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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