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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Breakthrough Could Lead to Amplifiers for 6G Signals [ieee.org]

With 5G just rolling out and destined to take years to mature, it might seem odd to worry about 6G [ieee.org]. But some engineers say that this is the perfect time [ieee.org] to worry about it. One group [ucsb.edu], based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been developing a device that could be critical to efficiently pushing 6G's terahertz-frequency signals out of the antennas of future smartphones and other connected devices. They reported key aspects of the device—including an "n-polar" gallium nitride high-electron mobility transistor [ieee.org]—in two [doi.org] papers [doi.org] that recently appeared in IEEE Electron Device Letters.

Testing so far has focused on 94 gigahertz frequencies, which are at the edge of terahertz. "We have just broken through records of millimeter-wave operation by factors which are just stunning," says Umesh K. Mishra [ucsb.edu], an IEEE Fellow who heads the UCSB group that published the papers. "If you're in the device field, if you improve things by 20 percent people are happy. Here, we have improved things by 200 to 300 percent."

Related: FCC Will Allow Wireless Devices to Operate in the 95 GHz to 3 THz Range [soylentnews.org]
Atom-Thin Switches Could Route 5G, and Even 6G Radio Signals [soylentnews.org]
Samsung's 6G White Paper: Available by 2030, 1,000 Gbps Peak Speed, 1 Gbps "User Experienced" Speed [soylentnews.org]
Scientists Build Ultra-High-Speed Terahertz Wireless Chip [soylentnews.org]

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