Columbia writes that this will enable circulators to be built into conventional chips and enable full-duplex or two-way wireless communication. Because so many devices are running in low-energy half-duplex, the frequency spectrum is getting congested. Moving to full-duplex means less congestion, and also higher bandwidth capacity.

So, how does this affect you and me? The school says the radar in autonomous cars "inherently" needs to run in full duplex mode, and be cheap. So these chips would play a part there. The silicon could also be used to create truly wireless VR headsets too, given how fast millimeter waves can transmit the surfeit of data VR requires.

The ultimate goal? Building a bigger array, of course.