Nanoresonators to improve cell phone connectivity
WASHINGTON: Now, you can avoid the nuisance of dropped calls and slow downloads with the help of tiny mechanical devices that can improve the performance of your cell phone by easing congestion over the airwaves.
Researchers from the Purdue University have designed devices called nanoelectromechanical resonators to ease congestion over the airwaves to improve the performance of cell phones and other portable devices.
They contain a tiny beam of silicon that vibrates when voltage is applied.
"There is not enough radio spectrum to account for everybody's handheld portable device," Jeffrey Rhoads, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University said.
The overcrowding results in dropped calls, busy signals, degraded call quality and slower downloads. To counter the problem, industry is trying to build systems that operate with more sharply defined channels so that more of them can fit within the available bandwidth.
"To do that you need more precise filters for cell phones and other radio devices, systems that reject noise and allow signals only near a given frequency to pass," Saeed Mohammadi, one of the researchers, said in a statement.
Researchers have shown that the new devices are produced with a nearly 100 per cent yield, meaning nearly all of the devices created on silicon wafers were found to function properly.
The nanoresonators control their vibration frequencies better than other resonators. The devices might replace electronic parts to achieve higher performance and lower power consumption.
The new resonators could provide higher performance than previous MEMS, or microelectromechanical systems.
"We are not inventing a new technology, we are making them using a process that's amenable to large-scale fabrication, which overcomes one of the biggest obstacles to the widespread commercial use of these devices," researcher, Rhoads, said.
In addition to their use as future cell phone filters, such nanoresonators also could be used for advanced chemical and biological sensors in medical and homeland-defense applications and possibly as components in computers and electronics.
The findings were published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology.