Faster wireless connection

Nowadays, we are able to capture every moment of our life with cameras, cellphones and mp4 recorders, yet these files could be to difficult to transfer to our laptops because of their size. Some of these files can be several gigabytes in size and it takes to much time to finally get to see them on your computer, and even more time if you transfer them wirelessly.

This is how a new technology was created. It is a speedy alternative called 'multi-gigabit communication module” and it is six times faster than a USB cable. Other advantage is that carrying a USB cable can be annoying for some people and it is easy to forget at home, but with this technology you don't need to.

Frank Deicke, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, took 'wireless' to another level. “It transfers data at a rate of 1 gigabyte per second (Gbit/s). To put this into context, one e-mail character has a size of eight bits. The infrared module is able to transfer 125 million characters per second,” Deicke said.

In general, cable connections between electronic devices are faster than wireless ones but in this case it is the other way around because the “multi-gigabit communication module” is six times faster than a USB2 cable.

What is more impressive is that when compared to a conventional wireless connection, like Wi-Fi, the IPMS solution is 46 times faster and when compare to other Bluetooth connections, the result was even more impressive. It is 1430 times faster!

For the conventional devices it takes more time because the process is too long. In simple words, when you need to transfer something, the data needs to be packed and unpacked but before that, the file needs to be converted into a radio signal and then the receiving device needs to convert it back into the file itself.

The researcher and his team had to build a small infrared module with fast-working hardware and software. 
  “We achieved this ultimately through a clever combination of different technical solutions,” said Deicke.

They used a transceiver, an optical component which is able to send and receive light signals simultaneously. The transceiver is very small and manages to fit in a laser diode to send light pulses and a photo detector to detect them. The decoders that receive and translate the encoded data are also crucial.

In the future this technology is expected to improve, going from 3 Gbits to 10Gbits per second and allowing us to connect any laptop to any camera without problems.