Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Alphabet has announced a new development for Taara's technology that could lead to low-cost, high-speed internet connectivity, even in far-flung locations. Taara's general manager, Mahesh Krishnaswamy, has introduced the Taara chip, a silicon photonic chip that uses light to transmit high-speed data through the air. The Taara chip is abut the size of a fingernail, far smaller than the technology the Alphabet division has been using. Taara Lightbridge, which is what its first-generation technology is called, is the size of a traffic light and uses a system of mirrors and sensors to physically steer light to where it needs to go. The new chip uses software instead.
Taara is a project under X, Alphabet's moonshot factory. The high speed wireless optical link technology underpinning the project was originally developed for X's Project Loon internet broadcasting balloons. Alphabet pulled the plug on Loon in 2021 and focused on Taara instead, using its technology to beam broadband across the Congo River and the streets of Nairobi. Even years before Loon shut down, Alphabet's X was already toying with the idea of using light to beam internet and tested the technology in India.
Taara's technology works by using a "very narrow, invisible light beam to transmit data at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second, up to distances of 20 kilometers (12.1 miles)." It's like traditional fiber, in the sense that it uses light to carry data, except that light doesn't travel through cables. Instead, Taara's hardware emits beams of light. The beams from two units must be aligned with each other to be able to form a secure link that can transmit data, which is why Lightbridge was fitted with the parts needed to be able to physically steer the light. Taara's new chip doesn't need those components: It contains hundreds of tiny light emitters controlled by software with automatic steering
Krishnaswamy said Taara's light-beaming units will only take days to install instead of the months or years it can take to lay fiber. During tests in the lab, the Taara team was able to transmit data at speeds of 10 Gbps over a distance of one kilometer (0.62 miles) using two of the new chips. They're now looking to improve the chip's capacity and range by creating an "iteration with thousands of [light] emitters." The team expects the chip to be available in 2026.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday March 08, @09:02PM (3 children)
The thing about free air optical is almost everything you see outside is evidence it'll be challenging to get it to work.
Rainbows are cool if you're not transmitting data.
Fog is romantic and cool looking (as long as you're not driving in it)
Notice how the sky is blue but sunsets are red? Again, not cool if you're trying to bounce light thru it.
I live close enough to a very small muni-class airport (mile or two?) that I can sometimes see the flashing beacon light hitting very low hanging clouds. Kind of cool. Unless your internet access is trying to shine thru that.
Free air optical does work, just... slowly. Of course sometimes thats enough.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Saturday March 08, @10:56PM (2 children)
Optical phased array is still an impressive feat.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Saturday March 08, @11:13PM (1 child)
So they're phase emitters?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 09, @04:02PM
In both senses, yeah. Reading between the lines from Toms Hardware and Wired (not exactly the pinnacle of reputable journalism, but could be worse) the laser is currently off chip and they're pushing hard to get the laser and the optical phased array stuff integrated onto the same chip of silicon. Yeah it'll be big but it can't be "too much" more expensive than something like a solar cell or large CCD camera array. I would imagine that after they get this working for comms they'll make red green and blue ones for projectors. I would imagine laser projectors would be pretty impressive.
It seems there's not much engineering coverage of this device at all, only clickbait-y journalism sites seem to have much of anything. You can't exactly pull a hundred-page engineering datasheet from Digikey's website (yet).
In the other sense "the trekkies" have a "phase emitter" that's fictionally described as a laser in all but name. I always assumed it was because "LASER" the acronym somehow got trademarked "back in the old days" so the writers didn't want to use that name. Good luck figuring that out. The first laser predates Trek TOS by some years but not many; possibly there's another explanation and its funny to imagine the writers may have "invented" something that actually existed in labs at the time although the writers may not have known about it.
Things moved faster in the old days, it would be a human generation at most from the lab to being "everywhere" for multiple techs, think lasers and transistors and atomic energy, and there's really nothing like that post Y2K or so. Maybe post-1970 human progress almost stopped other than a few exceptions like Moore's Law.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Sunday March 09, @12:21AM
It's Google. Interesting "technology", fun to talk about, to be discontinued next year.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday March 09, @12:35AM
At first read, I question:
Does it work in adverse weather?
- Rain
- Fog
- Dust ( The stuff you are always cleaning off your car windshield and windows. The stuff cameramen are always cleaning off their lenses. The stuff that collects on solar panels )
How does it handle having the Sun looking right into it. I mean dead-on? Knowing how the sun rises, arcs across the sky, then sets at different locations over the course of one solstice to the other, any approximate East-West usage is going to be looking directly into the sun for a few minutes twice a year.
---------- background
I became aware of this phenomenon when I went to a cellular modem for internet, and discovered I completely lost connectivity to the Internet at the same time for almost an hour every day, at almost the same time, which went on for a little longer than a month, then "it was fixed", only to return a few months later.
I was doing some work on an Arduino-based estimator for sunrise-sunset estimation for making a "Natural Time" which syncs to insolation ( Digital Phase-Locked Loop ), referencing "noon" as midway between sunrise ( when the solar panels begin producing ) and sunset ( when the solar panels stop producing ) using digital filtering techniques to filter out daily weather perturbations.
When I fed the location of the cell tower I am connected to, and my location, into the equations, sure enough, four times a year. The path of the sun is is right behind the cell tower from my house every evening for a few weeks every year, and the same thing will happen in the mornings when I am the one the cell tower has to see me in front of the Sun!
Oh well. I don't mow the lawn at night either. I accept it for what it is. Pure spherical geometry and physics. But I have stopped blaming T-Mobile for the crappy connection. There's little T-Mobile can do to fix it. especially after they had been so patient to share how they connected with me and where the exact tower I am connecting to is.
Right now, I only have a bunch of equations, but have been sidetracked by a rotting patio I want to replace, but dealing with business contractors and city functionaries with their ordinances and codes has proven to me that the getting of the permissions and agreements in place to get anything done is far more challenging than "do it yourself". My expertise in in energy conversion, building old-school analog-digital computer interfaces ( 80's type stuff using discrete analog parts , op-amps, magnetic amps, SCR, IGBT, that sort of thing ). I have little expertise in negotiating with city functionaries, as we have different religions. I have to follow the laws of physics, they have to follow ordinances.
Often, I remind myself that politics is akin to game of Global Thermonuclear War..."The only way to win is not to play!", And keep my retirement savings intact while the bureaucrats keep their jobs
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday March 09, @01:11AM
I failed to believe this.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snotnose on Sunday March 09, @01:13AM (1 child)
In the 80s I worked for a company that made microwave dishes for soldiers to communicate in the field. They were line of sight, you pointed one at the other and had pretty good bandwidth for the time. We were at a satellite location and to save money they used one of these dishes to connect our phone system to the mothership. One day we started getting spotty phone service. Problem turned out to be a crane between us and the mothership, it was only going to be up for a few weeks so they got a temporary solution for our phones.
Time came for the crane to be gone, now instead of spotty service we got no service at all from our microwave. Guess what that crane had been doing? Putting up a 2 story building, that's what.
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 09, @04:05PM
Shouldda used troposcatter, just up the wattage until you burn thru LOL.
That was one of those military technologies (or at least mostly popular with military, not civilians) where I don't know what people would think of it today. "Its foggy? No problem, just transmit more kilowatts" OK then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Sunday March 09, @03:43AM (2 children)
I wonder how then aim these chips so that they point straight at each other at a distance of a kilometer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday March 09, @04:12PM (1 child)
My guess is its like analog phone modems training at connection time and they rely on Shannons Law so a very wide beam might only communicate at 300 baud but thats good enough to narrow and train up. Once you get even a super slow bi-directional connection, they can narrow and speed up pretty fast.
I wonder if they can get narrow beamed enough that they can take advantage of multi-path. Use the best fastest channel most of the time and if that blips because a bird flies in front of it, instantly switch to one of the nearby although slower multipath channels. Literally shoot around birds, unless the bird is really big LOL.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday March 10, @04:18AM
That seems like it could work.