It is a very cool development but I see couple of issues with it:<p>1 - It works at about 60GHz. You are not getting a lot of distance or even going through a wall at that frequency and (likely) very low power levels<p>2 - The devices still need a central "base station". Presumably they rebroadcast to neighbouring nodes; but at lower power levels since they reuse some of the received power for themselves. I doubt you'd get more than 2 - 3 hops out before you don't have much power to begin with.<p>3 - He cites including these in fridges, coffee makers, light bulbs, etc. None of these are power constrained applications. You can put in $0.45 802.15.4 chip in them TODAY and it comes with a whole microcontroller inside to do what you want to do.<p>The tech here is no doubt "cool" but I don't see any applicability for IoT. If anything I think it would have some medical uses in pills you can swallow etc. But IoT use is kind of a dud.<p>Most IoTs have pretty good power source and you can run the w/ existing chipsets.
<i>Now Arbabian envisions networks of these radio chips deployed every meter or so throughout a house (they would have to be set close to one another because high-frequency signals don't travel far).</i><p>The whole concept is a bit creepy, but that particular sentence stood out. It's not hard to envision these tiny devices all having microphones and cameras... the Internet of Things That Watch You seems not far off.
This sounds almost exactly like amorphous computing... but not. Was that bit just left out of the article? Is the intention that these chips will be used one-at-a-time and perform significant computation onboard rather than (as with amorphous computing) having computation be an emergent property of the internetworking of many such chips?
I've just read the paper; it's academically very cool yet practically useless (at least for now).
It uses 24GHz for RX, 60GHz for TX so retransmission is just a fantasy of the "journalist". It requires +45dBm output power (32watts!) at the Basestation to power it at 50cm range, so less practical than regular RFID for now really (and absolutely no chance of ever working as a mesh).
You'd think it might work better if they had a bit of wire attached as an arial. Then they could use lower frequencies, get more range and so on, perhaps? Having mucked about connecting bits of wire to oscilloscopes it seems most of the signal that you could use to power something is 50/60Hz picked up from the mains. It would still cost cents given a bit of wire is not terribly expensive.
A light bulb <i>I</i> can control is nice, but one that <i>anyone</i> can control doesn't seem very useful. How does one implement security on top, since this is passive?
Comparing with existing wireless sensor network "motes", this is much much smaller - but do it's processing/networking capabilities match those of motes?
I'd like to know more about how it's powered. Didn't see anything on that. Seems like it's powered by proximity to that purple square.
"What is this? A radio for ants?"
"I don't wanna hear your excuses! The radio has to be at least... three times bigger than this!"