With funding from DARPA, electrical engineers led by Gabriel Rebeiz of the University of California, San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering have developed the world's most complex silicon phased-array transmitter. The chip itself is a mere 3.2 by 2.6 square millimeters.  The chip contains 16 elements and was designed to send at 30-50 GHz,the Q-Band, which is used for defense satellite communications.

Phased arrays have been in use mostly by the military and satellite communications. Cost prohibitive, often into the millions of dollars, the technology has not largely made its way into consumer products. The new chip, which is estimated to cost only a few dollars to produce in quantity, and its technology may leak into the commercial market.

“If you take the same design and move it to the 24 or 60 GHz range, you can use it for commercial terrestrial communications,” commented Rebeiz. Consumers could see similar chips being used for high-speed data transmission in portable devices, or direct broadcast satellite TV or data in vehicles.

According to Rebeiz, “If you wanted to download a large movie file, a base station could find you, zoom onto you, and direct a beam to your receiver chip. This could enable data transfer of hundreds of gigabytes of information very quickly, and without connecting a cable or adhering to the alignment requirements of wireless optical data transfer.”

Phased-arrays, also called beamformers, work as a collection of active antennas in which wave interference and reinforcement acts to create a directional signal, free of mechanical adjustment. By simply changing the phase of the antennas, the beam created can be aimed at a desired receiver in nanoseconds. Altering the amplitude of the signal changes the width of the beam, which can be important for getting data to one target without reception by others.

These super-responsive atennas can be used from everything from weaponry to communications. New military applications for phased-arrays primary focus around RADAR replacements, though experiments in beamformers have demonstrated promise in wireless power and weather observation as well.

The current chip can only transmit, however. Rebeiz and associates are working on a chip that can both transmit and receive.