Depending on where you live in the world, wireless data transmission is limited to either 3G or 4G speeds. If you are lucky enough to have an LTE capable device and connection, then the upper limit of your transfer speeds is 300Mbps. That’s fast by today’s standards, but won’t always be.
As the years go by the need for ever faster connections grows. You only have to look at broadband speeds as an example. 2Mbps used to be a fast connection, but 100Mbps is becoming ever more common. Now it looks as though the next wireless speed evolution has been created by semiconductor manufacturer ROHM.
Working with Osaka University, ROHM has developed a new wireless chip that utilizes terahertz waves to allow for up to 30Gbps transmission speeds. That’s a theoretical limit, but the first generation chip has already hit 1.5Gbps, some 5x faster than LTE.
The chip isn’t small enough to fit inside a smartphone yet, measuring 2 x 2 x 1cm with an integrated micro antenna, but then the infrastructure isn’t in place to take advantage of those speeds yet anyway. Even so, ROHM says it can produce the chip for $1.30, making it already cheap enough to add to a laptop or mobile hotspot device.
We won’t see ROHM mass producing the terahertz chips until at least 2014, by which time 4G will be the norm and some users will be complaining it’s too slow. Even if we do just get a bump up to 1.5Gpbs, at least we know the technology is scalable and could keep the speed increases coming for a few decades.