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Government Funded Atomic Clock On a Chip
An anonymous reader writes "Today most applications that require accurate atomic clock readings — from sorting separately routed telecommunications packets to timing simultaneous demolition charges — usually refer to signals from global positioning systems (GPS). For applications where GPS is unavailable, such as indoors, underground, undersea or on the battlefield where electronic jamming is present, large, heavy, power hungry hardware atomic clocks were needed. Now an atomic clock-on-a-chip is available that is the result of 10 years of government-funded research and development. The chip is not cheap — $1,500 — but it costs less than conventional atomic clocks and the price is sure to go down as manufacturing gears up to meet demand from military applications."
Psst... don't look now, but there is radioactive material in your smoke alarm.
The original press release is from January 18th 2011. Just sayin'. Of course this is a very nifty device and all that.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
From TFA:
He mentioned that, but he's trolling anyways - look at his sig.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
For those of us who need accurate clocks and don't have $1500 to spend, highly stable temp controlled oscillator chips are cheap and common right now. (Search eBay for OXCO)
For example, this one (which I'm using) is accurate in the PPB range:
But it's ATOMIC!
> ...there is radioactive material in your smoke alarm.
But none in this clock.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I can think of two to uses off the top of my head. The first is for really fast frequency hopping radios. The rate at which they can hop from one to the next has got to be in some measure limited to how accurate the clock they use is.
And the next one would be improved navigation. You could use these with ground stations and provide extremely accurate navigation and you could use more powerful transmitters so they would be harder to jam.
Now if they could uses these to put a time signature on every radio, tv, and cell tower You could improve navigation in areas where GPS doesn't work so well. Like in buildings. cites with lots of tall buildings, or areas with lots of tree cover.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I didn't even notice that he mentioned smoke detectors. And, nah, I'm pretty sure he's legitimately nuts.
pssst.. You naturally produce 4000 radioactive particles per second.
I would have guessed as much.
I've managed to block the radiation from beaming down into my head. Is there anything tin foil can't do?
Sounds like all of our children will be asking what they mean in "old" movies when they say "Synchronize watches!"
Is a hyphen too much to ask for? The headline states that in the past the government funded an atomic clock on a chip. It should read "Government-Funded" i.e. funded by the government.
Umm, not all smoke detectors are of the electrostatic variety. There are types that use an IR laser to check for particulates and smoke based on occlusion.
Also, for some fun facts, see The XKCD Radiation Dosage Chart! If you worry about smoke detectors, you'll be surprised at how much radiation you get from living in a brick house...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
"The chip is not cheap--$1500--but it costs less than conventional atomic clocks and the price is sure to go down as manufacturing gears up to meet demand from military applications start using it."
For the price to come down we'll have to wait for the Chinese to finish tooling their new plant.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
This orange represents your head. This tinfoil represents... well, tinfoil. This microwave represents... well, just watch.
Since there's no U-235 in it, you certainly may do so. Just like you can harvest the Unicorns in the chip and send them to meat processing plants. (which otherwise would be illegal due to the Unicorn horn trade that's been depleting the stocks of wild Unicorns)
atomic == NUCLEAR == WILL GIVE LIMITLESS ENERGY NOOOOOOO!!!!! Shouldnt happen == NOOOOOOOO NUCLEAR
just to avoid the caps filter
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
(1) most atomic clocks don't use anything radioactive, they use vibrations of cesium atoms. Given how up tight you are, something that vibrates might be useful to you.
(2) don't eat bananas.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
"The secret to the new atomic clock on a chip is a solid-state laser illuminating a tiny container holding normal non-radioactive cesium vapor."
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
Here's the press release http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/miniclock.cfm http://tf.nist.gov/ofm/smallclock/CSAC.html The 2011 version is comparatively huge -- http://www.smartertechnology.com/images/stories/rcjAtomicClockChip.jpg http://tf.nist.gov/ofm/smallclock/CSAC_files/shapeimage_6.png
So the laser simply asks the cesium what time it is.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Atomic == Nuclear
Be afraid of it !!
Symmetricon has been buying up all the other precision clock makers, and is now a monopoly. They can and do charge whatever they like for such products.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Your post is emitting more radiation than those chips will.
This guy has had a real atomic wristwatch for at least a decade. http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/
That just means we can't interrupt it.
Ever.
Yeah, and I put my geiger counter in the microwave to make sure it wasn't bugged, lo and behold it went wild with radiation warnings. I think they are storing old nuclear waste in new microwaves!
Get a web developer
- Takes a lickin' and keeps on clickin' (for those with geiger counters)
- Indiglo feature added at no cost
- First watch to be seen on restricted-exports list
- #1 excuse for tardiness changes from "My watch was slow" to "I've got radiation sickness"
- Watch is very compact, but power source is prohibitively large (and requires ~20 years to permit)
(yes, I realize the thing isn't actually radioactive)
CmdrTaco, can we please add a feature that automatically blocks any post with that word in it? There is absolutely no useful context for that word in 2011.
I thought she was Polish, not Indian... *confused*
It's an ATOM processor.
Seriously, this is much cheaper than some of the Wrist borne Chronographs... Tag Heuer look out!
Seriously though, I mean, sure you'll need a few more electronics and such to get it to show time, but over all, it wouldn't be a stretch to have a fully functional wall clock run off of atomic precision. Even better yet, it should have a SoC that'll hook it to your wifi network and advertise the time to anything in the area, and be accessible as part of the ntp pool.I know entire data centers that would be happy with something like that as a 1/2 U server, and I'm guessing it won't add much over and above this price, though someone will charge a premium for it anyway.
-=JML=-
lol
The title of the other submission "Submission: Atomic Clock-on-a-Chip Obsoletes GPS" is inaccurate. This does not obsolete GPS at all. It makes GPS unnecessary as a precision time source in some applications, but GPS = Global Positioning System, and this doesn't provide any positioning information, it's just highly accurate and stable time source. GPS also provides that, but it provides that from multiple satellites with well defined locations. Using the time differences from 3 or more GPS satellites, you can calculate a position on the earth. So, this is an alternative to GPS for systems that only need a highly accurate and stable time source, but not for those that need the positioning information you can get from GPS.
That it's small, non-radioactive, relatively inexpensive (for an atomic clock), and relatively low power offers many new possible uses. However, it's still far more expensive than a GPS receiver, so it won't replace GPS (or WWV/WWVB) as a time source for mainstream purposes until the cost comes down by at least a factor of 100, more likely it'll have to come down by a factor of 500 ($3) before it sees any mass adoption.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Does this mean I should stop eating Thai and Indian food?
IR laser-based smoke detectors work really well in combination with the kind that detect combustion, but they both trigger based on different signals, and it's not uncommon for one to go off and the other to not go off. So you really can't get by with just the IR-based detectors, unfortunately. But as you say, the exposure is quite low. You're more likely to die of a fire than a cancer caused by the radioactive material encapsulated in a smoke detector.
Don't go outside. "They" have made the atmosphere full of radioactive particles.
"They" being all those damn stars. Other parts of the cosmos are in on the conspiracy too! They are out to get us.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
More when you eat beans.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
So the laser simply asks the cesium what time it is.
...millions of times per second. Sort of like the world's most annoying child:
"What time is it? Are we there yet? What time is it?"
Trolling? I'd say it was a failed attempt at humor. Now whether the writer or the audience failed I can't say ... on second thought, it is the author's failure if the audience does not get it. "Thank you for your radiation, Madam Curry!" was perhaps too subtle. :-)
So the laser simply asks the cesium what time it is.
No, I'd say that when someone is pointing a laser at you then you are being interrogated. :-)
We have an number of network connectivity points at various telco hotels around the world, and in each we run an ntp server for various reasons. We had initially planned to use GPS clocks, but when you're in someone elses building, getting roof access is difficult/impossible. that leaves us Dependant on external providers for time, when we would much prefer to have a source for ourselves.
It would be great to be able to buy a 1u device with an atomic clock in it for each of our presences - I can't find any commercial products built around this yet, but I'll be keeping an eye out.
I imagine an uber-accurate clock like this could have big implications for proximity sensors that rely on time-of-flight (sonar, some lasers) and also for local, non-GPS positioning systems.
Atomic == Nuclear
Be afraid of it !!
Also, neither of those things necessarily means "radioactive".
BUT THEY'RE ALL TRYING TO KILL YOU WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
01101110 01101001 01100111 01100111 01100101 01110010
Decode the binary to win the prize...
(yes, there is a point to my post; the magic "feature that automatically blocks any post with that word in it" is called your amazing brain... if you can't deal with a sequence of ASCII, you have problems.)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-09/oonr-oon090203.php
Atomic clock that fits in your hand, but not quite a chip, from 2003. How is this a giant leap ahead?
I wonder what would happen if you overclocked it? :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these clocks!
So you really can't get by with just the IR-based detectors, unfortunately.
Quick! Somebody tell the International Code Council and the 95% of business and home owners that have had smokes installed in the last 10 years!
Where are you getting this idea from? The standard coverage accepted smoke is a photoelectric and has been for quite some time.
Why, yes, I am a part time code enforcement official who's jurisdiction just happens to be fire.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I can see your point that basically all, if not all posts containing the word are trolls / spam, but I can't imagine the trolls / spammers would take more than 27 seconds to ommit/replace/obscuvate it were it blocked, unless done very subtley.
Anything that is ATOMIC is likely to explode and kill us all, according to all the news reports. If these become cheap, we are going to be seeing cities blowing up on a daily basis! They had to get rid of the Nuclear part of MRI machines to avoid this same situation.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Is she a non-wax based polish? The wax based ones always seem to leave a build-up that's hard to remove.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Remember all those old TV shows where a group of people got together and sychronized their watches?
Ok, set your watch .... now! ... Hold it, Jimmy is 3 picoseconds fast! We have to do it again!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Cell phones communicate at a very high frequency (and the government wants to push it higher), which requires very precise time synchronization. Realistically, cell towers can just look at the GPS timing signal, which is extremely accurate, and base off that - probably with some decent atomic clock as a backup in case signal is lost for a period of ~hours or maybe days before noise becomes an issue.
Now take this indoors, and you lose your ability to resync your cell base station with an external stable source. Result: your frequency will shift away from the band you want. You either need a better clock on your indoor base station (at least as expensive as an outdoor one, thousands of dollars minimum), or some transmitter/networking that can resync outside this system (expensive, possibly unreliable).
As highly accurate clocks become cheaper, you could actually have indoor cell relays that wouldn't cost in the thousands of dollars - hopefully making it possible to get decent cell coverage in the city.
Bought and paid for with taxes, Open Source it!
You think it's cheap now...
I've designed kit with atomic clocks for undersea use, and specified where to procure them from. At the time (over a decade ago) rubidium clocks could be imported from Switzerland for between £1000 and £2000 with a choice of outputs (square, sine, frequency, amplitude...). They were the size of approx two Nintendo DSs on top of each other. Power consumption wasn't that bad.
Given how long ago that was, I imagine things have improved significantly in terms of form factor and power consumption since then.
So I'm not convinced on the headline assertions about how massive they are and the huge amount of power they draw :)
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
(2) don't eat bananas.
Actually the "banana equivalent dose" was scientifically wrong. Your body maintains a certain amount of potassium in it. If you add more, you just excrete the excess in your urine. Therefore eating a banana doesn't add significantly to your radiation exposure.
Better examples are Brazil nuts (which contain radium) or the "cuddle-equivalent dose" -- sleeping with someone exposes you to radiation from their body. One month's worth of sleeping with someone is about the same as what people have been saying (incorrectly) was the excess dose from eating a banana.
Find free books.
And someone moonlighting as an English teacher, presumably.
This could do wonders for RF communications. more precise RF carrier and modulation signals could mean better snr, more precise modulation, and most imporantly, better phase control at higher frequences dropping the bit error rate for PSK allowing more phases to accurately be displayed.
This will be ideal for setting up a GPS on cubesats for mars/moon. Such a system would require small amounts of circuitry since it would not be encrypted, nor taking commands. It would simply say when and where.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
One month's worth of sleeping with someone is about the same as what people have been saying (incorrectly) was the excess dose from eating a banana. /. can finally say that they slept with a hot girl on that one and only time.
Well, that means that many of the geeks on
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, not so much. Without exception (that I'm aware of) atomic clocks use quantum transitions between electron states, not nuclear states. They should really be called 'electronic clocks'.
Just got back from a conference where there was some discussion of thorium-based clocks that actually would take advantage of stimulated transitions in nuclear quantum states, but it is still highly speculative.
This strikes me as a bit of marketing. Everyone knows the ultra precise atomic clocks are as good as it gets, but cheap, less precise atomic clocks have been around for quite some time. In fact, you can do better with a high end temperature regulated quartz clock than a cheap atomic. And quartz offers the full range of options in between. I don't see any data on accuracy in tfa, so I'm going to assume it's slightly more accurate than a wrist watch...
http://ieee.li/pdf/viewgraphs/precision_frequency_generation.pdf
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, but Cesium has a half life of 30 years! So even if it's not radioactive now...
Thanks for telling me. No, really. I mean, most people would just not say anything and avoid me instead. At least now I know and I can do something about it. So I really appreciate you telling me.
There's a podcast where Fossey talks about the device on the Electronic Component News website: http://www.ecnmag.com/audio/2011/01/tinkers/first-Commercially-Available-Chip-Scale-Atomic-Clock.aspx
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
The thing is, a word like shit or fuck is merely a nuisance, but that word hurts people very deeply and there is never any valid context to use it. Yes, we have mods, but I was out of mod points to eliminate it, and still feel like something needs to be done to excoriate that kind of hate from our societal discourse. (And, FWIW, I'm a white guy in the South).
that word hurts people very deeply and there is never any valid context to use it
"that word" doesn't hurt anyone; blacks use it when talking to each other all the time.
Rude people saying deliberately hurtful things hurt people, and it has very little to do with their vocabulary. The solution to them is not censorship but learning to fucking deal with it. Sticks and stones...
And, FWIW, I'm a white guy in the South
So ... white man's guilt complex?
No, person respecting other people complex.
Yeah, yeah... respond to the obligatory troll bait and completely ignore the actual point I made.
And don't contradict me when I'm right.
I felt your point didn't merit discussion. But well enough. A derivative of that word is used by African-Americans too young to know what living in a society that used that word in its original context was like. This practice has been widely decried by more mature members of the populace who have actually lived through discrimination, segregation, and the like. For folks who remember what that's like having to use a separate bathroom, go to the back of the bus, and other far more egregious inequities, that word can be a powerful reminder of a past better left buried.
just dont take your networked widget with this thing embedded in it on a plane. chaos will ensue when you land. also avoid sudden acceleration.
Curie*