Future Technology Trends

Emerging technologies often tend to hit engineering roadblocks that hamper them from being useful. In the past year, there have been claims that “twisting” radio waves could significantly enhance the capacity of wireless bandwidth. Exploiting orbital angular momentum (OAM) is allegedly a unique method to transmit a larger amount of bytes. There are tons of portable devices available. Finding new ways to enhance their performance is desirable. Consumers have a voracious appetite to download media, but the laws of physics put a damper on how much data appliances can gather. The press releases pertaining to the novel discovery seemed too good to be true. A few researchers were making several ambitious statements about obtaining a huge number of different channels and an order of magnitude improvement. There are reasons to be skeptical of such proclamations. Scientists from Lund University in Sweden have published a paper, which indicates that the assertions relating to this breakthrough may be overblown.  Read More »

Scientists from the University of Michigan have developed a new mode for portable electronics that has the capability of extending battery life by up to 54 percent. They are presenting their work entitled “Cooperative carrier signaling: harmonizing coexisting WPAN and WLAN devices” at an ACM International conference this month. They have discovered that even when a phone is in idle mode, it still consumes a significant amount of juice. In power saving mode, the portables are searching for incoming wireless information and can spend 60 to 80 percent of their time doing this activity. The scientists have developed a better approach to deal with the necessary idle work called Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening (PDF).  Read More »

The idea of smart dust has been around for decades, but now researchers are working to make it a reality.  A nanoprocessor coupled with a nanomemory, nanoantenna and an energy source would be the basic building blocks for such a device.  A difficult problem for scientists is figuring out how these sensors can communicate with one another and send their data back to be examined.  The concept of wireless nanosensor networks (WNSN) would be to use electromagnetic radiation in the terahertz spectrum (100 gigahertz to 10 terahertz).  Terahertz (THZ) radiation has been adapted for a number of applications, which include higher resolution medical imaging and surveillance.   Read More »

Georgia tech researchers and other organizations are helping to lay the groundwork for the development of powerful wireless nanosensor networks. This technology has been the cornerstone of many futurist projections for decades and has tantalizing implications for a wide swath of fields. These networked sensors could potentially read biological processes and rapidly send that that data to a central supercomputer for analysis.  This could have a revolutionary impact on how health care is administered.   Environmental surveying, assessing disaster damages and military operations are other potential future uses.   Read More »