Nanoscale Silicon Chip Will Double Wi-Fi Capacity

Wi-Fi capacity can be strengthened with the latest technology invented by the research team of Harish Krishnaswamy. An Electrical Engineering Associate Professor developed a technology that only requires one antenna to enable a smaller overall system.

The Wi-Fi strength could be doubled on this latest technology, hence revolutionizing the world of telecommunications. According to Krishnaswamy, their circulator is first to use a silicon chip, and that they receive demands of better performance compared to their previous work.

The full-duplex communications, wherein the receiver and the transmitter work at the same time at a similar frequency has been an important research area that resulted in a breakthrough, Gizmodo reported. Wi-Fi can now be doubled on the nanoscale silicon chip with just a single antenna.

The team led by Krishnaswamy has been doing some works using silicon radio chips for the entire duplex communications for the past years. He was interested in the circulator, a component which allows full-duplex communications wherein the receiver and the transmitter share the similar antenna. To get this, the circulator must break the Lorentz Reciprocity or the basic physical characteristic of major electronic structures that need electromagnetic waves to travel in the similar way, in reverse and forward directions.

The usual way of breaking Lorentz Reciprocity as well as building radio-frequency circulators had been the use of magnetic materials like ferrites that lose reciprocity if an external magnetic field is applied. However, these materials do not work along with the silicon chip technology. In addition, ferrite circulators are expensive and bulky.

Also, Krishnaswamy's team was able to develop a highly miniaturized circulator which uses switches that will rotate the signal throughout a group of capacitors to copy the non-reciprocal "twist" of the signal which is seen in the ferrite materials.

Wi-Fi capacity is most likely to double through the full-duplex communications, compared to the half-duplex that is currently used in cellphones and Wi-Fi radios, First Post reported.