How New & Improved Circuits Are Making Loading Screens a Thing Of The Past

You’re killing time by doom-scrolling, as most of us do. Though we know that increased phone usage is linked with anxiety, depression and sedentary behaviors, it’s a compulsion that keeps us calm; it keeps our fingers moving and our brains active. In a more hopeful scenario, perhaps you’re ticking away the minutes between the bus’s arrival with a cute video about puppies, or a TikTok about communism that describes a low-fat way to eat the rich. Regardless of how you decide to spend your time on the glowing black mirror in your hand, at some point or another, you’re likely to come across a page that refuses to function the way you know it should.

We know the Twitter homepage like the back of our hand, after all–over ¼ of adults in the US use Twitter. We know that images aren’t supposed to just be empty boxes, that the ever-spinning circle beneath the bird logo is meant to lead to something. But, sometimes, it just doesn’t.

Why is that?

When it comes to data, simply put, there’s often not enough room on the surface of our cell towers for those who demand space.

This is where power amplifiers come in, small devices that offer more power-per-square-inch. These amplifiers, often in the form of CMOS, LDMOS, and silicon transistors, boost the radio frequency power.

If we have these devices, you might be wondering, why can’t we do this forever? Why can’t we boost and boost until everyone gets their daily dose of Facebook News? Because transistors have a maximum frequency (Fmax), an upper-boundary which cannot be crossed without causing damage and deterioration. Even before reaching this, transistors are known to operate within an efficiency region where we see their signal amplification abilities at their peak. Beyond this, difference between a resistor operating at 10VCE and resistor operating at 11VCE is nominal at best.

Looking at this in terms of broadcasting and the amplification of signals, the reason why we can’t simply increase the amount of bandwidth sent to our devices is because at a certain point, the amplification ability of the transistors responsible to said bandwidth simply plateaus, wherein adding more juice to our signals really won’t make much of a difference.

Another proposed way to combat slowing speeds and dead zones is to pump data to phones by the THz (terahertz) rather than the GHz (gigahertz) that we’re used to. THz, as the name implies, describes a unit of frequency defined as one trillion cycles per second.

That might not mean much on its own, so let’s examine what a single ‘hertz’ is.

Like bikes, trikes, and the circle of life, energy moves in cycles. These cycles are typically graphed as a wavering line moving up, down, and back up again, what some people might recall from high school calculus as a sine wave.

With this in mind, we can understand that 1Hz amounts to one full cycle in which a wave returns to its starting point of zero. 1Hz amounts to one cycle per sec, 10Hz amounts to 10Hz, and so on. Meaning that once we reach THz territory, we’re looking at technology that has the power to oscillate sine waves by the trillions each second. For this, however, we’re going to need to find ways to transmit lots of gain (which our current transistors aren’t meant to do), with lots of power and lots of efficiency, otherwise there’s a strong chance that even less of the transmitted signal will reach its target—your phone, in this case— and result in even more errors.

To fix this, we need to design infrastructure meant for heavy-duty tasks and heavy-duty signals, something that our current devices simply aren’t ready for.

“The amplifiers designed at THz frequency range should be able to exhibit high performance at center frequencies beyond 100 GHz frequency range, while covering 20-30% fractional bandwidth,” writes Heydari.

By comparison, the fastest 5G cell phone currently on the market runs upwards of 29–39 GHz, which is still only ⅓ of what the spaces this technology is expected to explore in the coming years.

While several key performance parameters including the bandwidth, communication range, and frequency still remain a challenge, solutions are on the way and, soon enough, nothing will stop you from binge-watching Moon Knight during your next big commute.