New Technology – June 2016

The InternetThere is a lot of recent news of technological breakthroughs that ought to have some an on telecom and broadband.

Faster Microwave Radios. A collaboration of researchers working for ACCESS (Advanced E Band Satellite Link Studies) in Germany has created a long-range microwave link at 6 Gbps speeds. The technology uses the very high E band frequencies at 71 – 76 GHz and in testing were able to create a data path between radios that were 23 miles apart. It’s the very short length of the radio waves at this frequency that allow for the very fast data rates.

The radios rely on transistor technology from Fraunhofer IAF, a firm that has been involved in several recent high-bandwidth radio technologies. The transmitting radio broadcasts at a high-power of 1 watt while the receivers are designed to detect and reconstruct very weak signals.

When perfected this could provide a lower cost way to provide bandwidth links to remote locations like towns situated in rough terrain or cellular and other radio towers located on mountaintops. This is a significant speed breakthrough for point-to-point microwaves at almost six times the speed of other existing microwave technologies.

Smarter Chip Processing. A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a programming technique to make much better use of denser computer chips. In theory, a 64-core chip ought to be nearly 64 times faster than one with a single core, but in practice that has not been the case. Since most computer programs run sequentially (instructions and decision trees are examined one at a time, in order) most programs do not run much faster on denser chips.

The team created a new chip design they call Swarm that will speed up parallel processing and that will also make it easier to write the code for denser chips. In early tests, programs run on the swarm chip have been 3 to 18 times faster while also requiring as little as 10% of the code needed for normal processing.

1,000 Processor Chip. And speaking of denser chips, scientists at the University of California at Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed the first chip that contains over 1,000 separate processors. The chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second.

They are calling it the KiloCore chip and it’s both energy efficient and the highest clock rate chip ever developed. The chip uses IBM’s 32 nanometer technology. Each chip can run separate programming or they can be used in parallel. The scientists envision using a programming technique called the single-instruction-multiple-data approach that can break applications down into small discrete steps so that they can be processed simultaneously.

Faster Graphene Chips. Finally, US-Army funded researchers at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies have developed a technology that could theoretically make chips as much as 1 million times faster than today. The new technology uses graphene and relies on the phenomenon that graphene can be used to slow light below the speed of electrons. This slowed-down light emits ‘plasmons’ of intense light that create what the scientists called an optic boom (similar to a sonic boom in air).

These plasmons could be used to greatly speed up the transmission speeds within computer chips. They have found that the optic booms can push data through graphene at about 1/300th the speed of light, a big improvement over photons through silicon.

The researchers have been able to create and control the plasmon bursts and are hoping to have a working graphene chip using the technology within two or three years.

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