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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."
We have radiation oozing in Japan, radiation still in Nevada at the nuclear test sites, and radiation bombarding us from our smoke detectors. Now they want radioactive clocks in our chips?! When will this madness stop?
Cancer, tumors, subluxations, autism... Thank you for your radiation, Madam Curry!
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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.
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:
Expect the "nigger socialists wasting teh taxes pirate^Wprivate is teh better" trolls in 3...2...1
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.
for sale to Israel?
Yours In Islamabad,
Kilgore Trout
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.
"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."
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
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.
This guy has had a real atomic wristwatch for at least a decade. http://leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/
- 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)
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=-
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
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.
Why is the Gubermint doing this?!?!?! Let the market decide!!!!!
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.
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?
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these clocks!
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!
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.
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
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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
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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.