Scientists Developing Wireless Transceiver to Go Beyond 5G Network

Electrical engineers from the University of California Irvine are in the process of developing a new type of wireless transceiver that could conceivably leave the 5G network in the dust. They believe their new ‘end-to-end transmitter-receiver’ will be able to boost radio frequencies all the way into 100-gigahertz territory. That’s nearly four times the speed of standard 5G wireless communications — and scientists are eager to make this idea a reality. The wireless transceiver is constructed from a 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip. This chip can process digital signals faster and more energy-efficiently than current iterations, in large part due to its digital-analog design. However, this effort has not been without its complications and drawbacks. Scientists have been forced to work around Moore’s Law, which has long posed a problem for engineers. In order to overcome this issue, researchers used a chip that modulated the digital bits in the analog as well as the radio-frequency domains. This helped to relax the digital processing requirements, allowing the chip to operate at lightning-fast speeds.