According to the United Nations' telecommunications agency, 93 per cent of the global population has access to a mobile-broadband network of some kind. With data becoming more readily available to consumers, there is a greater demand for more of it and at faster speeds.
Now a research team at Texas A&M University has designed a chip that could revolutionise the current data rate for processors and technologies such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.
Ramy Rady, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team - including faculty advisor and professor Dr. Kamran Entesari, along with Dr. Christi Madsen and Dr. Sam Palermo, are moving toward the use of microwave photonics, a branch of optics that focuses on improving the quality of microwave signals using photonic structures. The advantage to Rady's project over all previous solutions is its small size and high-speed operation, i.e. frequency...