Scientists have come up with something really interesting this time which includes some major advancement in the genre of wireless technology. They have developed a Wi-Fi chip which requires one antenna only as opposed to normal functioning two antenna’s for transmitting and receiving signals.
Although this was possible before too, but there was a problem with the old method that one antenna had to take turns in receiving and transmitting which in turn reduced the overall capacity by half. This is where the new technology comes in; it solves this bottleneck problem of the old method and hence doubles the speed of wireless signals in a single antenna. Making it possible, to use one antenna instead of two.
This newly introduced system is called full-duplex communications. This system includes the wireless transmitter and a receiver of a radio, where both of the components work at the same frequency and time making it more efficient than before.
The team of electric researchers gathered to form the same phenomenon a year ago using two antennas but this time the same team from the Columbia University managed to come up with something similar with a single antenna.
"The way I like to think about it is it's like having a conversation between two people where both people can talk at the same time and still listen to what the other person is saying," says lead researcher Harish Krishnaswamy in the video below.
"So obviously you can imagine that if you're able to do that, conversations would take half the amount of time that they take right now. And similarly, in full duplex, if we could have transmitters and receivers working at the same time, at the same frequency, we'd immediately be able to double wireless capacity at the physical layer."
The circulator, which has made the dull duplex communication system possible, breaks the Lorentz Reciprocity. This is basically a principle under the category of electromagnetism which explains that the waves must travel in the same way in either direction.
"Reciprocal circuits and systems are quite restrictive because you can't control the signal freely," said one of the team, Negar Reiskarimian, in a press release. "We wanted to create a simple and efficient way, using conventional materials, to break Lorentz Reciprocity and build a low-cost nanoscale circulator that would fit on a chip."
Usually the Lorentz Reciprocity can be disrupted through magnets but since magnets are not really good to be placed on a silicon chip, magnets have not been used by the researchers in this experiment. They instead used series of switches which imitates the similar effects as of magnets and end up negating reciprocity. This finally led to the two way signals communication through the use of a single antenna.
