DISQUS

Next Big Future: Taiwan Makes Fastest System on a Chip, 100 times Wifi Speed for less than $1

  • daggilli · 1 year ago
    As regards the RF propagation effects mentioned above, I don't recall anyone talking about 60GHz as being anything other than short range. The big attenuation spike at this frequency was sufficient for us to call it the 'oxygen band', and that was fifteen years ago. Attenuation is a good thing, up to a point, in wireless LANs, because of the frequency re-use it engenders in the spatial domain. Spatial bandwidth is bits per second per meter squared (or Tbits/s/hectare or whathaveyou). On-air bandwidth is only one criterion. Being able to talk to someone next to you without MAC contention from someone three doors down is a plus.

    Multipath is a problem, of course, but the amount of computational horsepower you can throw at it these days is enormous. All of the diversity combining techniques are amenable to cheaper silicon. In '95, the best available DSP cores (SHARC, if memory serves) to implement a Kalman filter for a DFE in the HIPERLAN environment would have made for a PCMCIA card you could have used to fry an egg. Things are different now.

    I've been out of the field for years, but i don't think the physics has changed all that much.
  • nextbigfuture · 1 year ago
    There are companies already using 60Ghz with parabolic antennas for Gbps links of 1-3 miles.