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World's Wireless Record Breaks 40 Gbit/s [Emirates News Agency (WAM) (United Arab Emirates)]
[October 23, 2014]

World's Wireless Record Breaks 40 Gbit/s [Emirates News Agency (WAM) (United Arab Emirates)]


(Emirates News Agency (WAM) (United Arab Emirates) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A new world record has been set in wireless data transmission rates -- 40 gigabits per second, which is over 40-times faster than the ceiling for Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced of 1 Gbit/s. The breakthrough was announced at the Compound Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Symposium conference in San Diego on Oct. 22, 2014.



The new world's record is in the 141.5 to 148 GHz band, compared with LTE's 698 MHz to 1.4 GHz bands (depending on your location). The first application for the new wireless super-speed will be for back haul between cell towers, but many other applications are possible besides mobile phones. Ericsson plans on transmitting signals to and from base stations and cellular towers.

Herbert Zirath, the co-inventor, professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and part-time employee at Ericsson Research, told EE Times: The band from 141.5 to 148 GHz is assigned for fixed and mobile communication by the FCC. Though at this moment we are concentrating on making the chipset work well, we will make real wireless transmission demonstrations over an air-interface next year. Typical applications in the short term are mobile backhaul, high data-rate links over distances of up to a few kilometers, wireless camera HDTV transmission at big arenas with ultra-low latency, and so on. Possibly, it can be used for WLAN in the future as well -- we will work toward such demonstrations... Backhaul and similar cell tower-to-tower applications are served today by transceivers in the 141.5 to 148 GHz band, but at half the speed of Zirth's invention, which he made at Chalmers in collaboration with researchers Sona Carpenter and Mingquan Bao, along with Simon He, who performed the data-transmission measurements. The chip size is 1.6 x 1.2 square millimeters.


In order to double the speed of backhaul and similar wireless communications gear, the researchers had to resort to exotic indium phosphide transceivers, which is one reason the inventors gave for why they succeeded when all other attempts had failed so far.

We have designed our circuits with very high bandwidth, greater than 30 GHz, in an advanced semiconductor process -- 250 nanometer DHBT [double heterojunction bipolar transistor] with four metal-layers offered by Teledyne Scientific of Thousand Oaks, Calif., Zirath told us.

The team has been working on this invention for over a decade, finally pulling all the pieces together this year.

We started research on millimeter-wave transceivers about 12 years ago. We have also been focusing on high-data-rate transmission research for over six years. Over these years of hard work, we have gradually built up a knowledge base from many people's results. It is partly luck that we made it first, but we have been working towards this goal for long time, Simon He told us.

Next the research team wants to finish building its real-world demonstration, which means packaging the transceiver chips and interfacing them with all the other necessary circuitry. Then it's on to even higher speeds.

We will make demonstrations, various prototypes, and in addition, move up to higher frequencies. Packaging of the chips and signal processing electronics is underway in our ongoing project. We are aiming at demonstrating 100 Gbit/s within a few years' time frame with this or a modified chipset, says Zirath.

Funding is being provided by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.

(c) 2014 Emirates News Agency (WAM) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).

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