Japan Team Develops New Chip Devices for Wireless Communications

Tokyo, Feb. 12 (Jiji Press)--A research team of Tokyo Institute of Technology has developed two new semiconductor devices for wireless communications that are seen helping promote fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile phone services and the Internet of things. The team, including Kenichi Okada, associate professor at the university, will announce the achievement at an international conference of solid-state circuits in San Francisco. One of the devices, using millimeter waves that have a higher wavelength than microwaves currently used in wireless local-area network services, can transmit data at speeds about 100 times faster, the team said. It can send 4.7 gigabytes of data in only 0.3 second, according to the team. While the 5G mobile phone services would require the construction of more base stations, the device will make it unnecessary to lay fiber-optic cables between the base stations and will thus enable the establishment of a high-speed communications network at an early time, the team said. The other chip device developed by the team is compatible with the Bluetooth wireless technology standard. Its electricity consumption is the lowest for any such device in the world, the team said, noting that it can operate for 15 years on a single button cell. A total of some 45 trillion units of equipment, such as self-driving vehicles, are expected to be networked around the world in the 2030s when the use of the IoT is seen spreading. END