Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads | Hacker News Reader

Graphene Antennas Would Enable Terabit Wireless Downloads

technologyreview.com

38 pointskumarski32 comments

Graphene is quickly acquiring buzz-word status.

As a physics grad student, I wanted to mention that graphene _was_ a buzz-word a few years ago. It's popularity has since died significantly in the community. It's still around, but nowhere near as popular as it used to be. Maybe the same will happen in popular science?

Just theoretical, no prototype yet. Seems a bit early to get excited.

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

But a battery is a capacitor. Well, technically not, but they behave similarily, with the battery storing more energy per cubic centimeter than the capacitor, at the trade off of having a much higher internal resistance. Also I believe he meant data storage, since we have battery technologies which would work for this application, even though more juice is always a juicy prospect.

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.

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 handle it.

So should these researchers sit on their hands until such time as hardware capable of utilizing those transfer rates exist? The mathematical modeling here is at the very least useful in determining this is a path worth exploring with prototypes.

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 better batteries or faster storage devices.

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?

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.

Yes,

I didn't mean to imply this use would be unimportant. This could be huge.

I was typing up a serious response about multiple devices and wireless interconnects, instead I'll just go with:

"640k of memory should be enough for anybody"

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.

This is indeed interesting, but I'd say far beyond the needs. 10Gbps wireless transfer already exists (e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/27/ntt-docomo-confirms-succe... ), and that is beyond what flash based memory can do. In any case, it would mean transferring a BluRay in something like 30 seconds, assuming you had a faster drive.

What it would do is end the concept of "local storage". Online is faster.

Don't be so quick. Don't just consider single link transfers, remember that wireless is always shared bandwidth. If you have a terabit for everyone that means you can have hundreds of megabits for tens of thousands of folks in a small area all connected to one access point / cell tower.

They are talking about terahertz bands that aren't suitable for distance communication, the ranges are practically measured in centimeters.

> They are talking about terahertz bands that aren't suitable for distance communication, the ranges are practically measured in centimeters.

If this argument had merit, light would be unsuitable for long-distance communication.

Water vapor in these bands is a strong absorber limiting distance in earth's atmosphere to ~10 meters or less. Subtract a good deal for omnidirectional emissions and decent snr.

That's very wavelength-specific, as this graph shows:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Atm...

Water and water vapor has the same effect on the visual part of the spectrum also, but this doesn't reduce people's enthusiasm for it as a potential communications medium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation

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

I wonder how much spectrum it would stomp on? Or is it possible to increase bandwidth without using more spectrum? Better time resolution?

None. Transmissions in the terahertz range are currently not part of any FCC allocation (which maxes out at 300 GHz).

does anyone know of any commercially available products incorporating graphene yet?

Pencils. Well, layered graphene.

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