Engineers have discovered a method of doubling Wi-Fi speeds at Columbia University. At the steering wheel of the discovery is Harish Krishnaswamy, an electrical engineering graduate who has utilized one antenna that doubles the speed of Wi-Fi says, “This technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications.”
The work has been doing in the Columbia High-Speed and MM-Wave IC LAB that works with integrated circuits in order for wireless communication to be achieved. They concern themselves with building on already known communication devices and seeing how they can be improved.
It includes utilizing nanoscale ‘full-duplex radio integrated circuits’ which can transmit and receive using the same frequency, leading to a doubled capacity. Krishnaswamy uses an analogy that pertains to two people talking at the same time – to each other – but can both hear and understand what the other one is saying. That’s how this technology works.
Krishnaswamy says, “Full-duplex communications, where the transmitter and the receiver operate at the same time and at the same frequency, has become a critical research area and now we’ve shown that WiFi capacity can be doubled on a nanoscale silicon chip with a single antenna.”
The researchers see a future where this benefits devices like smartphones and tablets. One of the other members of the team, Jin Zhou, said: “Being able to put the circulator on the same chip as the rest of the radio has the potential to significantly reduce the size of the system, enhance its performance, and introduce new functionalities critical to full duplex. It is rare for a single piece of research, or even a research group, to bridge fundamental theoretical contributions with implementations of practical relevance.”
The video below will give you more of an idea of how the technology and science work behind creating a one-antenna WiFi chip:
