Less than two weeks after a team of scientists created a nanoscale radio component, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have gone one better -- announcing the creation of the world's first complete nanoradio.

The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio -- antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. Physicist Alex Zettl led the development team, and graduate student Kenneth Jensen built the radio.

"I'm totally amazed that it works so well," says Zettl. "Making individual components are good breakthroughs, but the holy grail was putting it all together. So we're ecstatic that we were able to achieve that full integration."

The radio opens the possibility of creating radio-controlled interfaces on the subcellular scale, which may have applications in the areas of medical and sensor technology.

Nanoelectronic systems are considered crucial to the continued miniaturization of electronic devices, and it's becoming a hot research and investment arena. Two weeks ago, a team at the University of California at Irvine announced the development of a nanoscale demodulator, an essential component of a radio.

The number of consumer products using nanotechnology -- from the iPhone to home pregnancy testing kits -- has soared from 212 to well over 500, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies' online inventory of manufacturer-identified nanotech goods in March 2006.

The nanoradio is less than one micron long and only 10 nanometers wide -- or one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair -- making it the smallest radio ever created.

The researchers' paper was published at the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters website.

The first transmission received by the nanoradio was an FM broadcast of Eric Clapton's "Layla." (The lab has posted video of that moment.) The Clapton classic was quickly followed by the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and Handel's Largo from the opera Xerxes -- the first piece of music broadcast by radio, on Dec. 24, 1906.

The nanoradio's amplifier operates on the same principles as vacuum-tube radios from the 1940s and early '50s, says Zettl.

"We've come full circle. We're using the old vacuum-tube principle of having electrons jump off the tip of the nanotube onto another electrode, rather than the conventional solid-state transistor principle," says Zettl.

The electronic properties of this electron-emitting nanotube function as the radio's demodulator -- making a complete radio possible within a single molecule.

The audio quality "can be very good," says Zettl, but if you listen closely, some unique effects of the radio's tiny size can be heard: an old-fashioned "scratchiness" that occurs because the device is working in the quantum regime.

"The amazing thing is that since we have such a sensitive nanoscale system, individual atoms jumping on and off the nanotube cause a perturbation that you can hear," says Zettl. He notes that this effect can be eliminated through the use of a better vacuum.

Because of its small size, the nanoradio could be inserted into a living human cell, opening up the possibility of exciting medical applications for the technology, says Jillian M. Buriak, an expert in nanotechnology at the University of Alberta's chemistry department.

"These carbon nanotubes are so small that we can have a radio-controlled interface with something that is on the same length scale as the basic submachinery of the cell and the basic workings of life," says Buriak.

The nanoradio could be used to see inside cells in real time and under normal conditions, instead of current techniques, which involve "exploding the cells and going in and looking at the remnants," says Buriak.

"This device could allow you to spy on the cell and do things inside the cell at the molecular level, which is really neat," says Buriak, who is currently researching how to enable interactions between individual human neurons and computer chips.

The Lawrence Lab team is currently working on ways to integrate the radio with biological systems, says Zettl.

"We have colleagues here in Berkeley who are experts in cell biology, and aspects of biological interfaces to nano-electromechanical structures, so we're exploring the different possibilities of mating this radio with other systems to take advantage of its size and power," says Zettl.



source http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/11/nanoradio#ixzz0pDkb0e1m
Nanoradio WiFi solution is inside the world's first 3G UMA mobile phone

Nanoradio today announced that its "Always On WiFi"TM solution has been commercially launched inside the world´s first 3G UMA phone. The same "Always On WiFi"TM solution was also recently launched in a 2.5G UMA phone. The two phones, P250 and P270, will both be released by Samsung in multiple countries in Europe, opening up a new world of multimedia services to the UMA operator customer base. The P270 is the first device on the market that combines UMA and 3G network technology.

Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) using dual mode cellular/Wi-Fi handsets are a rapidly developing market on both sides of the Atlantic. Low power consuming Wi-Fi solutions are a critical enabling technology for this type of applications. The UMA phone requires the WiFi to be active all time in order to receive an incoming or making an outgoing UMA call.

The Nanoradio "Always On WiFi"TM solution - the NRX700/2 Wi-Fi chipset offers fully tested 802.11b/g functionality, featuring ultra-low power consumption enabling unparalleled UMA standby time and UMA talk time. The Nanoradio WiFi solution is doubling the standby and talk time compared to standard UMA phone offerings. This results in that the UMA phone customer can adopt a behaviour of keeping the WiFi Always On, removing the need for a “turn on and off the WiFi behaviour” in order to save battery time.

Tord Wingren, CEO and President of Nanoradio AB, commented, “We are very proud to have launched our WiFi product with a Tier 1 phone manufacturer and a Tier 1 operator, in an environment with extreme requirements on power consumption, stability and output power. We are confident that this experience, in combination with our best in class size and price will be very competitive in other mobile phone applications using WiFi.”


About Nanoradio AB

Nanoradio design semiconductors with wireless capability for the cellular and handheld market where buying decisions relate to power consumption, stability, physical size, and total cost for customers.

Nanoradio has developed the most integrated circuits which bring outstanding WLAN capabilities into mobile phones and consumer multimedia electronics. Nanoradio´s Wi-Fi chips target a range of applications, including mobile phones, wireless network cameras for home surveillance, Portable media Players and gaming devices. Another big area for Nanoradio is the growing fixed-mobile convergence market with dual-mode phones.

The company was founded in March 2004 and it is a "fabless" company which means that all manufacturing is outsourced. Nanoradio has a team of 70 people with extensive experience from the cellular and wireless industry as well as semiconductor industry and start-ups. The head-quarter is in Kista, Sweden and with sales offices in Korea, Japan and USA.

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Press: Annika Engelhart, Market Communicator, annika.engelhart@nanoradio.com
Information on the company may be found on the World Wide Web at www.nanoradio.com

Nanoradio

A nanoradio is a radio receiver or transmitter constructed on a nanometer scale. Currently only receivers have been developed and they are structured around a carbon nanotube. The first such device was described in October 2007 by a team led by physicist Alex Zettl.

The nanotube, about 10 nanometers in diameter and several hundred nanometers long, is contained in a vacuum and one of its ends is connected to an electrode of a battery. The other electrode is placed a short distance from the nanotube's other end. The tube, now charged, will vibrate in tune with any external electromagnetic signal, effectively acting as an antenna. The favorable vibration frequency can be adjusted by changing the applied voltage, which allows to tune the radio to different carrier frequencies. The field electron emission effect causes a current to flow, as electrons tunnel across the gap between the tube and the second electrode. This current represents an amplified version of the radio signal; no demodulation is necessary.

source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoradio

NanoTube Radio: Supplementary materials

K. Jensen, J. Weldon, H. Garcia, and A. Zettl
Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley
Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, University of California at Berkeley
Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

The following media files are intended for public access. Please contact A. Zettl or K. Jensen for permission before reproducing any of these images, videos, or audio files or alterations of them. All rights reserved ©2007.

IntroductionWe have constructed a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver, orders-of-magnitude smaller than any previous radio, from a single carbon nanotube. The single nanotube serves, at once, as all major components of a radio: antenna, tuner, amplifier, and demodulator. Moreover, the antenna and tuner are implemented in a radically different manner than traditional radios, receiving signals via high frequency mechanical vibrations of the nanotube rather than through traditional electrical means. We have already used the nanotube radio to receive and play music from FM radio transmissions such as Layla by Eric Clapton (Derek and the Dominos) and the Beach Boy's Good Vibrations. The nanotube radio's extremely small size could enable radical new applications such as radio controlled devices small enough to exist in the human bloodstream, or simply smaller, cheaper, and more efficient wireless devices such as cellular phones.

Videos
If you use any of the following videos, please include the credit "Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley."

A high resolution transmission electron microscope allows us to observe the nanotube radio in action. We have recorded four videos from the electron microscope of the nanotube radio playing four different songs. At the beginning of each video, the nanotube radio is tuned to a different frequency than that of the transmitted radio signal. Thus, the nanotube does not vibrate, and only static noise can be heard. As the radio is brought into tune with the transmitted signal, the nanotube begins to vibrate, which blurs its image in the video, and at the same time, the music becomes audible. The four songs are Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, Largo from the opera Xerxes by Handel (this was the first song ever transmitted using radio), Layla by Eric Clapton (Derek & the Dominos), and the Main Title from Star Wars by John Williams.

Good Vibrations (Quicktime, 8.06 MB)
Layla (Quicktime, 6.13 MB)
Largo (Quicktime, 8.73 MB)
Star Wars (Quicktime, 8.68 MB)

This simulation shows the electric field surrounding the nanotube radio during radio operation. Notice how the field is strongest at the tip of the nanotube and how the field varies as the nanotube vibrates. This effect allows the nanotube radio to demodulate radio signals.

Nanotube radio simulation movie (Quicktime 15.3 MB)

Still Images
If you use any of the following images, please include the credit "Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley."

Over the past century, radio has shrunk dramatically from the wooden "cathedral" style radios of the 1930s to the pocket-sized transistor radios of the 1950s and more recently to the single-chip radios found in cell phones and wireless sensors. Continuing this trend, we have further miniaturized the radio by cleverly implementing multiple radio functions with a single component, the carbon nanotube. This nanotube radio is over nineteen orders-of-magnitude smaller than the Philco vacuum tube radio from the 1930s!

Nanotube radio timeline and size comparison1,2 (TIFF 22.1 MB)
Nanotube radio timeline and size comparison (small)1,2 (JPEG 96.4 KB)

Images, taken by a transmission electron microscope, show a single carbon nanotube protruding from an electrode. This nanotube is less than a micron long and only ten nanometers wide, or 10000 times thinner than the width of a single human hair. When a radio wave of a specific frequency impinges on the nanotube it begins to vibrate vigorously. An electric field applied to the nanotube forces electrons to be emitted from its tip. This electrical current may be used to detect the mechanical vibrations of the nanotube, and thus listen to the radio waves. (The waves shown in this image were added for visual effect, and are not part of the original microscope image.)

Nanotube radio tower (TIFF 26.0 MB)
Nanotube radio tower (small) (JPEG 71.7 KB)
Nanotube radio tower without waves (TIFF 26.0 MB)
Nanotube radio tower without waves (small) (JPEG 541 KB)

This simulation shows the electric field surrounding the nanotube radio during radio operation. Notice how the field is strongest at the tip of the nanotube and how the field varies as the nanotube vibrates. This effect allows the nanotube radio to demodulate radio signals.

Nanotube radio simulation (TIFF 1.45 MB)
Nanotube radio simulation (small) (JPEG 47.8 KB)
Nanotube radio simulation movie (Quicktime 15.3 MB)

Audio
If you use any of the following audio files, please include the credit "Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley."

Layla by Eric Clapton (Derek & the Dominos) was the first song played on the nanotube radio. The entire received song may be downloaded below. Though there is a significant amount of static noise, the song is easily recognizable. All of this was accomplished with none of the external circuitry to filter or process the signal typically found in macroscopic radios.

Layla (entire song) (WAV 2.82 MB)

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation within the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems and by the US Department of Energy.

References
[1] The Philco and Regency radios were photographed by Gregory Maxwell and are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License as described here.
[2] The Smartdust image was published in B. A. Warneke, et al, Proc. IEEE Sensors, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 1510.
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Last modified: Fri Nov 09 12:22:16 Pacific Standard Time 2007