Wi-Fi 'reflector' hooks you up at 0.1 per cent of current power budget By using absorption and reflection to indicate data states, NASA reckons it's created a Wi-Fi device for the wearable market that uses just 0.1 per cent of the power of ordinary transceivers. Working with Frank Chang at Caltech UCLA, the JPL boffin Adrian Tang is keen on ways to let devices with relatively low communications …
The base station or router will consume more power – NASA doesn't say how much – since in the current scheme, it transmits a constant signal to the far-end device. However, the pair of researchers are working on getting around that requirement.
Well nothing comes for free - as we have another transition from peer to peer back to client server for power rather than just compute. Interesting idea.
My only problem with this is that one needs to use something the size of the Arecibo radio telescope dish to make RFID work farther than 40.000 mm away. Granted, RFID also uses that energy to run the chip itself which I gather is not the case here. On the other hand, RFID usually has a half-decent sized loop - again, not the case here. *Yoda voice* ...curious piece of tech this is...
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This is a great incremental progress that will bring benefits to all electronic communications devices much sooner than those instantly-rechargeable carbon nanotube batteries we've been hearing about for the past 15 years without seeing so much as a shadow in the stores.
Given the length of time I take between changing phones, there's a good chance my next will have this tech and I'll be able to have it on WiFi all day long without needing to put it on sector all day as well.
And anything that reduces power consumption should be greeted with open arms anyway.
And anything that reduces power consumption should be greeted with open arms anyway.
But will it? I would think that the same amount of power would be used overall, at least, but the requirements are moved from one place to another. So in, say, a wearable, it means that device doesn't consume as much energy, but the access point (which could be a phone) will consume more.
I actually used to work with RFID chips and one issue which came up was extending the scanners reading range.
The range is limited by near field effects BUT there are a few ways around it such as using Litz wire coils and active phase cancelling to feed back an inverse copy of the noise to the preamplifier and null it out without seriously weakening the signal.
Signals >20dB below the noise floor can be recovered by using a time shifted randomization routine on the transmit end and there are also ways to recover data from successive partial frames using interpolation if a CRC code is used.
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