Tiny and passively-powered radios would make for some interesting applications. One major issue is that you cannot shrink an antenna down infinitely; its size is dependent upon the wavelength of EM radiation that it is trying to detect. Researchers at Stanford and Berkeley have announced "ant-sized" radio-on-a-chip devices, fabricated at 65nm, which are powered by the signal that they gather.
The catch is that, because their antenna is on the order of a few millimeters, it is tuned for ~60 GHz. There are reasons why you do not see too many devices operate at this frequency. First, processing that signal with transistors is basically a non-starter, so they apparently designed a standard integrated circuit for the task.
The other problem is that 60 GHz is an Extremely High Frequency (EHF) and, with its high frequency, is very difficult to transmit over long ranges. The 57-64 GHz region, in particular, is a range which oxygen resonates at. While it is possible to brute-force a powerful signal through a sensitive antenna, that defeats the above purpose. Of course, the researchers have been honest about this. Right in their IEEE abstract, they claim a current, measured range of 50cm. In their Stanford press release, they state that this is designed to be part of a network with units every meter (or so). Current bandwidth is a little over 12 megabit.
Simply put, this will not become your new WiFi hotspot. However, for small and connected devices that are in close proximity, this could provide an interesting communication method for when size, cost, and power efficiency trump speed and range.
Can they make these in a
Can they make these in a ruggedized square or cubic dimension about the size of a grain of salt, embed them in a synthetic clay material that never dries out, and can report, or have determined, their 3D location within the synthetic clay material. I would love to have some smart clay, that could then have its exact(close to exact as possible) shape transferred into a representative 3D model. Ok MIT media lab, get to cracking, I know you are up to the task, and while you are at it, whip up a Linux asymmetrical processing OS distro, that can turn all my connected laptops, PCs, tablets, and phones, etc., into one big asymmetrical distributed computing platform, and make it connect seamlessly through Ethernet, or better, wirelessly Gb+, or both. That includes any IOTs around the house that could spare some idle processing power, just turn my house into one big render/compute farm, where even the toaster could be brought into the general purpose computing equation, it’s probably running an embedded Linux distro “ToastX” anyways. OK, now get those big chess club sized brains working on this!
One side needs to be ~3-5mm
One side needs to be ~3-5mm in order to properly induct (receive) the signal. That is, unless you go to even higher frequencies (which has its own problems).
Maybe short enough pulses to
Maybe short enough pulses to get the inductor/antenna size down. but still power the device, and some short pulses from the device to return a signal/s, which can be triangulated to get the spatial coordinates. Can the antenna be made in a spiral fashion, or the whole device be encased in a micro-sphere and the antenna wrapped around the inside of spherical shell. The synthetic clay material would have to be transparent to electromagnetic radio waves, and even if the devices themselves where a little larger than a grain of salt, there would still be enough devices dispersed through the smart clay to get a good representation of the sculpted object. The sculpted objects made with smart clay could be made larger than their intended scale, and then the produced digital 3d model scaled to whatever size for the finished piece. A large number of these smart beads could be dispersed into the synthetic clay, and each device irradiated with the correct frequency EM pulses, and encode a unique signal/digital ID that also can be timed to reveal position in 3D. At least 4 or more separate receivers would have to be present in the room and calibrated, but that should not be hard. Methods could probably be devised to do away with the need for unique ID on the individual beads/tags so any duplication of tag ID problems would be obviated. With a smart clay the size of the original sculpture would not be limited to the size of a laser scanning table, and could be made larger than scale to produce finer detail in the scaled down model.
So i red that they experiment
So i red that they experiment with 32W transmitter.Is that right?
” First, processing that
” First, processing that signal with transistors is basically a non-starter, so they apparently designed a standard integrated circuit for the task.”
What do they make these magic circuits with?
They didn’t seem to say
They didn't seem to say publicly. I assumed they used something like an RLC circuit to convert between external high frequency and a lower frequency to process internally.
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