Indian origin engineer develops technology for simultaneous Wifi transmission and reception

Harish Krishnaswamy, associate professor of electrical engineering, Columbia University  A team of Columbia University researchers believes that enabling reliable and efficient full duplex wireless communication is a task best addressed at the chip level. The researchers, led by Harish Krishnaswamy, an associate professor of electrical engineering, have developed full-duplex radio integrated circuits that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency. "Having a transmitter and receiver use the same frequency offers the potential to immediately double network data capacity," Krishnaswamy says. "Our work is the first to demonstrate an IC that can receive and transmit simultaneously," he says. CMOS is the dominant technology used for radio ICs inside phones and other radio-equipped mobile devices. The biggest challenge the team faced during its research was canceling transmitter echo, a phenomenon that makes usable full duplex impossible. "What you really need to do is to cancel-out that echo to the point where it's eliminated almost perfectly and the residual echo is extremely small - smaller than the received signal, the desired signal - that you're trying to receive from the distant cell tower," he says. Since the echo is over a billion times more powerful than...
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Scientists Develop New Ways to Solve the Mysteries of Mars

Credit: ESA Scientists hope to finally reveal how and why Mars has changed so dramatically through time, from an ancient world of rivers and oceans, to the dry and dusty planet that we see today. Dr James Darling, at the University of Portsmouth, is leading a three-year study which aims to get to the bottom of what happened to Earth’s nearest neighbour, the so-called red planet. He has been awarded £ 342,000 funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Dr Darling is an expert in isotope geochemistry in the University’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He said: “Without a robust timeline of the geological events on Mars, we can’t understand how or why it changed from an ancient world of rivers, oceans, volcanoes and meteorite impacts to the cold, dry planet that we see today. “This project will help to reveal how the planet has evolved through new radiometric age dating of martian meteorites. Previously, this has been very difficult because these rocks have experienced extreme deformation during meteorite impact events, which can disturb the isotopic systems used for dating. We can now overcome this by identifying microscopic deformation features in crystals that can be avoided or targeted for radiometric dating using the latest techniques in mass spectrometry. “I am excited...
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