Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#11

Post by solistice »

freehunter wrote: post #6
short_circut wrote: post #4

I find claims of such to be somewhat questionable. Even if we could enable Terabit speeds over wireless it does not good if the hardware receiving it is incapable of handling that much data in that short of time. I mean we get max hard drive write speeds of 3.0 GB/s for the average user. Ram and CPU are still on the order of Ghz. We may be able to cram that much in the air but it does no good if the computers can't h…

It's a fair point. It's the same bottlenecking issue that plagues mobile devices. We can make multi-core and multi-ghz processors with giant, bright, high resolution displays, but we're having a hard time getting battery technology to keep up with this immense power draw. The good news is, with these restraints being placed on improvements in technology, it gives incentive to further invest in research to making bett…

There's a graphene for that too. Or rather graphene supercapacitors, which for their size and thickness are remarkable. They'll likely be a tease for a couple of years, move into specialized products like pacemakers and then slowly flow into the consumer market, just like Li-Ion batteries did, Light Emitting Diodes and Transistors. R&D, why do you torture me so, showing me powerful technology I could design sexy things with, due in a couple of years?

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#12

Post by hosh »

I remember John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe where the human electronic tech was based on microchip modules communicating to each other wirelessly. There are no wires. I just never expected to see people developing such technology a few years after I read that.

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#13

Post by hosh »

joe_the_user wrote: post #9
short_circut wrote: post #4

I find claims of such to be somewhat questionable. Even if we could enable Terabit speeds over wireless it does not good if the hardware receiving it is incapable of handling that much data in that short of time. I mean we get max hard drive write speeds of 3.0 GB/s for the average user. Ram and CPU are still on the order of Ghz. We may be able to cram that much in the air but it does no good if the computers can't h…

It may be that kind of rate would wind-up only being useful within a chip or between closely spaced chips.

Yeah. But that is already incredibly useful. When assembling electronic components from a number of suppliers, you would not have to wire them up into a circuit board. You only need to physically put them close to each other and then configure them to talk to each other.

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#14

Post by solistice »

landypro wrote: post #3

Now we need a storage medium capable of supporting those transfer speeds.

You could save attempt to use some kind of parallel setup down to the silicon layer to achieve these data throughputs.

  [S R ][bit0]->[line 0]
  [H E ][bit1]->[line 1]
  [I G ][bit2]->[line 2]
  [F I ][bit3]->[line 3]  
  [T STER...etc.
It's late over here though, so I expect this design to have an obvious fatal flaw.

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#15

Post by nb13 »

hosh wrote: post #12

I remember John Scalzi's Old Man's War universe where the human electronic tech was based on microchip modules communicating to each other wirelessly. There are no wires. I just never expected to see people developing such technology a few years after I read that.

Well, the article says they've only drawn up blueprints of how the technology could work so far. I hope they start actually developing this soon though.

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#18

Post by [deleted] »

freehunter wrote: post #6
short_circut wrote: post #4

I find claims of such to be somewhat questionable. Even if we could enable Terabit speeds over wireless it does not good if the hardware receiving it is incapable of handling that much data in that short of time. I mean we get max hard drive write speeds of 3.0 GB/s for the average user. Ram and CPU are still on the order of Ghz. We may be able to cram that much in the air but it does no good if the computers can't h…

It's a fair point. It's the same bottlenecking issue that plagues mobile devices. We can make multi-core and multi-ghz processors with giant, bright, high resolution displays, but we're having a hard time getting battery technology to keep up with this immense power draw. The good news is, with these restraints being placed on improvements in technology, it gives incentive to further invest in research to making bett…

[deleted]

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#19

Post by femto »

oakwhiz wrote: post #16
zwieback wrote: post #8

Make it a fractal graphene antenna and you've got next years funding locked up!

Too bad fractal antennas are patented. US Patent No. 6452553

Odd, given that the log-periodic antenna is fractal and invented around 50 years ago (1957 by Duhamel and Isbell?). I personally was working with such antennas in 1992. They're not called fractal, since their invention predates the invention of the work "fractal" in 1975, by Mandelbrot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-periodic_antenna

--- Edit:

The owners of the patent actually acknowledge the above in a FAQ on their site [2]. It's accompanied by an unconvincing justification for why they claim to own fractal antennas.

[2] http://www.fractenna.com/nca_faq.html

Re: Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

#20

Post by dhughes »

S_A_P wrote: post #7
landypro wrote: post #3

Now we need a storage medium capable of supporting those transfer speeds.

Im sure graphene will be involved with that too ;)

Yes the graphene covered DVD put in a LightScribe DVD drive made a supercapacitor I'm sure that knowledge may someone help in making better batteries (yes I know a capacitor isn't a battery).

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326.ful

Post reply on HN