Anyone who has attempted to make a phone call at a crowded music festival or sporting event can speak to the frustration of making a phone call when the network is crowded. A new design out of UCLA could offer what has been the dream for years: unlimited bandwidth, no matter the situation.

Part of the reason that too many phones in the same place make it hard to get anything done online is that each device needs its own chunks of available wireless spectrum to both send and receive data. If any two devices share the same chunk, or one device is trying to send and receive on the same chunk, the data can clash.

To attempt to solve this problem, UCLA's electrical engineers worked with circulators, small devices that take in and send out electromagnetic waves from different ports. Circulators aren't traditionally used in cellphones because of their use of magnetic materials. However, the engineers at UCLA, as detailed in their paper in Scientific Reports, used coaxial cables to route the electromagnetic waves through non-magnetic material.

The researcher call these "sequentially switched delay lines," which the engineers compare to transportation.

"In a busy train station, trains are actively switched onto and off of tracks to minimize the time they might be stopped to get into and out of the station," said Yuanxun "Ethan" Wang, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science who led the research. "This is the same idea, only with electromagnetic waves of the same frequency carrying information inside a chip."

The circulators has six transmission lines, all of which are the same length. They are connected by five switches. These switches are turned on and off sequentially, which distributes electromagnetic waves while allowing for simultaneous transmission and reception of data-carrying signals.

UCLA circulator

The circulator won't be ready for this year's Coachella, however. There's still a lot of design work left to be done: a prototype was built with commercially available parts, and the working model would likely have to be built with silicon. But still, the engineers are optimistic.

"Just like a capacitor or a resistor, a device capable of routing electromagnetic waves is a fundamental building block in almost any circuit," Wang said. "Making it available with unlimited bandwidth would trigger a revolution in design of mobile phones, automobile sensors or even quantum computers."

Source: UCLA

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