2025-08-01 02:00:03
It’s often said that a single moment can spark a lifelong journey. For me the moment happened in 2011, when I was a graduate student—not in a lab or a classroom but rather in a conference hall in Rome. I was presenting my graduate research on a helix antenna for wideband terrestrial and GPS L2 communications at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation. EUCAP, organized by the European Association on Antennas and Propagation, is supported by IEEE.
Although I attended the conference to receive feedback on my research, I left with something far greater: an introduction to IEEE.
At the time, I didn’t know that the organization would redefine my career, expand my worldview, and plant the seeds of a purpose-driven life in engineering.
I returned home energized, not only to grow in my field but also within IEEE, so I joined as a graduate student member.
Fourteen years later, I now serve as chair of the IEEE Islamabad Section, having walked a journey built on learning, leadership, and the belief that engineering must serve humanity.
Upon returning to Pakistan after EUCAP 2011, I realized the immense potential for creating meaningful local impact on the country’s engineers if IEEE’s global energy and resources were effectively harnessed. My background in RF and microwave engineering played a central role in shaping my contributions to IEEE.
While working at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad, I identified a pressing local need that could be addressed using IEEE’s support and resources: The country lacked a centralized platform for microwave and RF-related research, collaboration, and training.
To fill that gap, in 2016 I formed Pakistan’s first joint chapter of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation, Circuits and Systems, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Microwave Theory and Techniques societies.
The joint chapter offers workshops and technical sessions for academics, students, and young professionals. It also provides opportunities for international collaboration and networking among IEEE members.
More than 200 events have been organized, bringing distinguished professors and researchers to Pakistan as speakers. The visits catalyzed IEEE memorandums of understanding that included student exchange programs and cross-border research.
More importantly, they exposed hundreds of young Pakistani engineers to world-class knowledge. Faculty and students from all over Pakistan are participating and working at facilities they couldn’t previously access, such as anechoic chambers and electromagnetic compatibility labs that are used in antenna and microwave device testing.
Our efforts were recognized in 2019 and 2020 with Best Chapter Awards from the societies that formed the joint chapter.
During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, the chapter launched a webinar series on YouTube that showed how to use instruments for the characterization of antenna and microwave circuits.
Nosherwan Shoaib [middle], Hammad M. Cheema [left], and Muhammad Umar Khan accepted the Best Chapter Award on behalf of the joint chapter of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation, Circuits and Systems, Electromagnetic Compatibility, and Microwave Theory and Techniques societies. Cheema is its vice chair and Khan is its treasurer.Ghulam Rasool
I have led several IEEE humanitarian projects that have improved lives in some of Pakistan’s most underserved communities.
One project that left a lasting impact on me was building homes for families displaced from the 2022 floods in the Sindh province. Pakistan that year experienced the deadliest floods the country had ever seen. An estimated 33 million people were affected, and 20 million are still living in dire conditions. The floods damaged houses, hospitals, and electricity and road infrastructure.
With support from the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Board, the IEEE Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology, and NUST, IEEE volunteers built 17 homes. They were equipped with solar-powered energy systems that provided electricity for lights, fans, and other basic equipment, ensuring long-term sustainability.
IEEE volunteers also provided vocational training to survivors, equipping them with practical skills in basic electronics and solar installation. Their efforts aimed to restore livelihoods, promote self-reliance, and empower people to launch home-based businesses.
In 2023 I worked with EPICS in IEEE to develop a virtual reality–based therapy platform aimed at supporting behavioral development in children with autism. A team of undergraduate students developed the platform, which uses a VR headset to simulate behavioral and communication therapy scenarios within the metaverse. The platform is still being tested and validated.
Another EPICS in IEEE initiative I led involved designing and deploying a smart fall-detection system for elderly people in assisted-living facilities. The system uses 60-gigahertz radar sensors to monitor posture and alert caregivers in the event of a fall.
Promoting diversity and inclusion has been a vital part of my IEEE journey. Thanks to support from the IEEE Women in Circuits and Systems group and the IEEE MTT-S diversity and inclusion ad hoc committee, I have organized initiatives aimed at inspiring women and other underrepresented groups to pursue engineering as a career.
I was chosen as a STEM champion this year in the IEEE TryEngineering program. Champions work to do more STEM outreach and connect future engineers with IEEE resources.
IEEE has been more than a professional network; it has been my launchpad for leadership, my platform for humanitarian impact, and my community of mentors.
I promote STEM education by engaging with preuniversity schools and organizing hands-on activities to spark curiosity and learning. Being a champion has been an enriching experience.
My belief in equitable access to education has been the cornerstone of my STEM outreach efforts. I have led more than 30 workshops in collaboration with 20 local nonprofits, benefiting more than 500 orphans and homeless children. The hands-on sessions covered radar, robotics, wireless communication, and other topics. Together with a team of IEEE student volunteers, we also trained teachers to replicate the activities in schools.
Through my work, I have had the opportunity to instill core ethical values in students living in underserved communities. This role has allowed me to advocate for both technical excellence and moral responsibility—two pillars I believe are essential for building a better future through engineering.
A major turning point in my volunteer journey came in 2022 through the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities Volunteer Leadership Training program. The VoLT program is designed to deepen volunteers’ understanding of IEEE’s structure, products, services, and available resources. It also helps participants appreciate their role within local units and the broader organization while preparing them for leadership roles. VoLT participants complete a team project, in which they identify a problem, a need, an opportunity, or an area of improvement within their local organizational unit or the global IEEE. Then they develop a business plan to address the concern.
For me, the program provided clarity, confidence, and community. My team project—an AI-based vestibule for IEEE—was ranked second among the submissions. The program was more than just a training exercise; it was a catalyst for my growth as a structured, strategic, and succession-focused leader.
One of my most recent leadership opportunities was chairing the Towards IEEE Pakistan Council mini-conference in May. The event brought together executive committee members from IEEE sections and subsections across Pakistan to explore the formation of a national IEEE council to unify efforts with global IEEE practices.
I also spearheaded the establishment of the IEEE Islamabad Section life member affinity group and the IEEE Communications Society professional chapter.
I believe the active involvement of senior members is essential—not only for their mentorship and wisdom but also to help the section reach new heights of excellence.
I strongly believe in cross-institutional collaboration—which is why the IEEE Islamabad Section is actively partnering with organizations including the Pakistan Aerospace Council, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to amplify our impact on the engineering and scientific community. The partnerships will enable joint technical seminars and training workshops that broaden our outreach and strengthen our contributions.
Through international conferences, seminars, joint workshops, and collaborative projects, the IEEE Islamabad Section has engaged with leading electronics companies Rohde and Schwarz of Munich and Keysight Technologies of Everett, Wash., to promote innovation, skills development, and applied research. The collaborations enhance students’ professional readiness and enable industry partners to connect with emerging academic talent and cutting-edge ideas.
What started as a student membership has grown into a purpose-filled career-long journey. IEEE has been more than a professional network; it has been my launchpad for leadership, my platform for humanitarian impact, and my community of mentors. Every conference I organized, every child I taught, every family I supported, and every volunteer I mentored are chapters of my story, which IEEE helped write.
To all young engineers, students, and professionals reading this: IEEE is what you make of it. It can be merely a line on your CV, or it can be a compass that guides your career and character. When you align technical skill with empathy and pair leadership with service, you not only grow, you uplift others as well.
I invite you to join, volunteer, and lead. Somewhere, someone is waiting for a solution only you can create—and IEEE can help you deliver it.
My journey has never been mine alone. It has been a collective effort powered by an extraordinary community. I look forward to continuing the mission together, as we strive to make IEEE not just a professional home but also a platform for lasting impact.
2025-08-01 00:00:03
One of the most sobering insights from Contributing Editor Robert N. Charette’s feature story in this issue is that the 20-year rollout of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States happened with an intentional disregard for interoperability. As a result, thousands of health care providers are “burdened with costly, poorly designed, and insecure EHR systems that have exacerbated clinician burnout, led to hundreds of millions of records lost in data breaches, and created new sources of medical errors,” Charette writes.
The U.S. government made this myopic decision in order to speed up EHR adoption, ignoring the longer-term costs. The operating mantra, says Charette, was that EHR systems “needed to become operational before they could become interoperable.”
You could call what happened next “unintended consequences,” but that would absolve decision-makers in government and industry for making choices they knew could compromise user experience, security, and patient outcomes. The results were entirely foreseeable. A more appropriate term might be “systemic blowback”—large-scale negative outcomes that result from decisions to accelerate the adoption of new technology without consideration for the broader potential impacts.
Once you see systemic blowback in one technological context, you start to see it in others. Case in point: the global deployment of artificial intelligence.
In May, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, maker of Claude AI, told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years. (U.S. unemployment was about 4 percent in June.) “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei said. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
But Amodei’s acknowledgment of the potential harms of mass AI adoption comes off as just virtue signaling. Big AI, Amodei surmises, will continue to develop this technology so we can cure cancer, grow the economy 10 percent annually, and even balance the federal budget. And by the way, up to one in five people will soon be unemployed. That last part—the harm—is someone else’s problem to solve.
Computer programmers are feeling the harm right now. According to The Washington Post, more than a quarter of all coding jobs have vanished in the last two years, with much of that loss attributable to AI usage. As Spectrum reported last month, LLMs are improving at an exponential rate, which doesn’t augur well for the rest of the human workforce.
“Systemic blowback”—large-scale negative outcomes that result from decisions to accelerate the adoption of new technology without consideration for the broader potential impacts.
That includes people working in media. Ever since Google emerged as the home page of the Web in the early 2000s, media outlets operated under the assumption that Google would reliably crawl their sites and send audience their way.
Google blew up that deal when it introduced AI answers to its entire user base earlier this year. Since then, Spectrum has had about double the impressions—the times Spectrum content shows up on the search results page or, increasingly, in an AI answer—and about 40 percent fewer click-throughs from people coming to our website to read the cited article. As Web traffic dies, so do the business models predicated on that traffic. Oh well, says Big AI, someone else’s problem.
But killing off the current information ecosystem means that AIs will increasingly ingest new content written by other AIs, because the humans who produced the content are gone or will be soon. Garbage in, garbage out. This time next year, don’t be surprised when your shiny, new AI agent gives you a morning briefing that’s just off. Then Big AI’s problem will be your problem. Sooner or later you too will feel the systemic blowback.
2025-07-31 21:00:03
With more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in the sky today, low Earth orbit may seem like the place to be to connect the next generation of Internet and cellphone customers. However, some players are placing their bets slightly closer to the ground.
Starting next year, Tokyo’s SoftBank Corp. will be beaming a prototype 4G and 5G phone and broadband service from the stratosphere to Japanese end users. Floating 20 kilometers above the Earth, the company’s airship-based mast will be using energy-regeneration tech and newly allocated spectrum. And the tech could ultimately pose a real, competitive threat to satellite-based platforms like Starlink.
The Japanese telecom giant announced last month it had secured exclusive rights to deploy stratospheric, lighter-than-air craft over Japan. SoftBank’s precommercial airship “tower” delivering 4G and 5G cellphone service, the company said, will be coming in 2026. The solar-powered airship, developed by the Moriarty, N.M.–based Sceye, has already completed more than 20 successful test flights. In the same press announcement, SoftBank also described its plans to also use heavier-than-air, fixed-wing uncrewed aerial vehicles that the Japanese company has developed.
Unlike the SoftBank system’s fixed-wing signal repeaters, Sceye’s airship will be an autonomously piloted cell tower operating below outer space but still above the weather. The airship will carry the same type of base station used in terrestrial cell towers (called 4G eNodeB/5G gNodeB), which will comply with global broadband standards, as overseen by the Third Generation Partnership Project, or 3GPP.
“The mobile phone doesn’t know the difference between our platform and a tower,” says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye’s CEO. “We just plug into existing infrastructure and operate under the same 3GPP protocol.”
Sceye’s airship uses advanced antenna systems that enable precision steering of the signal. Also known as beamforming, this 5G tech helps a network cover wide areas or, conversely, focus bandwidth down to a tighter cone, depending on demand. The company reports that its system’s latency is below 20 milliseconds. That would put it ahead of Starlink, which delivers today a network latency of 45 ms, according to a recent survey.
“This is not a relay system. We are the base station, able to respond to network demand from the stratosphere,” says Frandsen.
With a payload capacity of 250 kilograms and 10 kilowatts of onboard solar power capacity, the airship can power its telecom suite but also station-keep—something that neither balloons (which drift with the wind) nor fixed-wing UAVs (constrained by limited payload and power) can achieve.
Which is why Sceye’s advances in materials have been crucial for high-altitude endurance flights. According to the company, the fabric comprising the airship’s hull is five times as strong per unit mass as conventional high-altitude platform system (HAPS) materials. Sceye’s material is also 1,500 times more gas-tight, as well as being more resistant to both UV and ozone damage.
“There’s a lot of overlap between extreme sports like the America’s Cup or Formula One and our work on HAPS,” said Frandsen, who recruited engineers from both sectors. “It’s all about pushing materials to the limit, safely.”
But even using such a supermaterial for the airship’s skin, staying aloft at an altitude of 20 kilometers demands further innovations toward greater efficiency. “On this kind of machine, about 30 percent of the weight goes to the structure, and another 30 percent to the energy system,” says Vincenzo Rosario Baraniello, Head of the Earth Observation Systems Unit at the Italian Aerospace Research Centre (CIRA). “Improving those technologies gives a competitive advantage”.
Sceye’s silvery dirigibles are built for endurance, capable of pointing into the wind, and remaining in their area of operation for months at a time. Ultralightweight and flexible solar skins and high-density battery packs keep the equipment running overnight. While the system’s temperature- and UV-shielded payload compartment can withstand extreme stratospheric conditions. The airship can reach altitude in less than 30 minutes, with a single craft able to replace up to 25 ground towers.
The time has come, says Nikolai Vassiliev, chief of the Terrestrial Services Department at the International Telecommunication Union, for stratospheric systems like Sceye’s and SoftBank’s prototype network.
“We have established power limits, coordination rules, and harmonized bands,” Vassiliev says. “Now it’s up to operators to deploy.”
Until recently, high-altitude platforms like Sceye’s and SoftBank’s airship relied primarily on millimeter-wave spectrum, including bandwidth between 47- and 48-gigahertz frequencies. Millimeter waves, though, have limited range and are notoriously vulnerable to rain and other inclement weather. Which is why, in part, the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023 opened up a number of microwave bands between 700 megahertz and 2.6 GHz for HAPS.
These lower-frequency bands effectively opened the way for direct-to-device connections from stratospheric airships and other high-altitude platforms. “The availability of harmonized, low-band spectrum for direct-to-device HAPS has fundamentally changed the business case,” said Toshiharu Sumiyoshi of SoftBank’s Ubiquitous Network Planning Division. “We can now deliver service with commercially available handsets.”
Unlike earlier high-altitude platforms that acted like signal relays, Sceye’s high-altitude towers will ultimately allow users to cross coverage zones without losing service, thanks to handovers between ground and aerial nodes. And that could look and feel to the end user much like everyday terrestrial 4G and 5G coverage.
SoftBank is still weighing how best to deploy Sceye’s stratospheric platforms, whether as always-on infrastructure or as on-demand responders during emergencies and other periods of anticipated high demand. “Our current plan aims for one aircraft to stay in the air for one year,” says Sumiyoshi. “But both scenarios, continuous flight or launch in response to a disaster, are conceivable. And operational details will be finalized after precommercial testing in 2026, taking cost-effectiveness and multiuse options like remote sensing into account.”
Baraniello says whatever form the deployment ultimately takes, it marks an important step forward. “The partnership between Sceye and SoftBank is significant,” he says. “It shows that these platforms have reached a level of technological maturity that allows them to be deployed operationally. From an aerospace-engineering standpoint, that’s a big deal, and the market’s interest will further push research, industry, and development forward.”
2025-07-30 22:00:02
When it comes to learning digital system design, hobbyists and students have a lot of options, whether it’s tinkering with field-programmable gate arrays or working up chip submission for a Tiny Tapeout run. But similar tools for analog design have been harder to come by. Certainly you can create analog circuits in a simulator like LTspice and test them against theory. But nothing beats building real analog circuits and measuring their actual, not theoretical, behavior. Measurement is complicated for analog designs because the test equipment can affect the very measurement being made.
To address this educational gap, a team led by me at Columbia University’s department of electrical engineering created MOSbius, a breadboard-friendly chip that you can think of as a field-programmable transistor array for analog designs.
As its name suggests, MOSbius is built around metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors, divided between n-type and p-type transistors. As these are the building blocks of most analog integrated circuits today, designing with the MOSbius provides experience that’s directly relevant to creating real chips.
The MOSbius has 68 pins, of which 63 connect to either individual transistors or common analog subcircuits such as current mirrors and op-amp stages. Two other pins are used for positive and negative supply voltages.
The MOSbius chip [top left] contains all the transistors required for many analog systems. Mounted on a breadboard via a printed circuit board [middle], discrete resistors and capacitors [bottom] are wired up to provide other needed components. A Raspberry Pi Pico [bottom right] is used to program the MOSbius.James Provost
The remaining three pins are used for programming a built-in switch matrix. You can create circuits with the MOSbius by connecting the pins with external wires. But it’s easier to use the switch matrix. This can connect any of the 65 transistor, subcircuit, and voltage pins to one or more of 10 internal buses. The matrix is programmed by clocking in a simple stream of 650 bits—one bit for each possible connection between a bus and a pin.
We program the MOSbius’s matrix using a Raspberry Pi Pico running a Python script that turns a simple JSON text file into the desired bitstream. If you want, though, you can use pretty much any 3.3-volt microcontroller that supports Python.
The MOSbius runs at 2.5 V. The printed circuit board used to connect the pins to a solderless 830-contact breadboard shifts the Pico’s 3.3 V down when programming the matrix. The PCB also includes bias and over-voltage-protection circuits.
As the MOSbius contains only transistors, circuit elements like resistors and capacitors are wired up externally as through-hole components inserted into the breadboard. You might think that using these external components would create an imprecise approximation of the behavior of a real analog IC, which has on-chip resistors and capacitors built out of silicon rather than, say, a metal film or ceramic material.
But at signal speeds below about a megahertz, the actual issue is that these external components are overly precise. (Above 1 MHz, things like the stray capacitance of the breadboard begin to become an issue.) Even a cheap through-hole resistor will have an actual resistance that’s within 5 to 10 percent of the value it claims to be, and through-hole resistors with 1 percent accuracy are common. By contrast, integrated components can easily vary by 30 percent from their nominal value.
Consequently, real analog circuits have to be built with a considerable amount of internal margin. Developing the skill to do this relies on understanding what’s going on at different points within the circuit, as input signals and component values vary. And that requires making real-world measurements.
The “aha” moment of seeing your circuit come to life will stay long after the equations are forgotten.
In a simulated circuit, you can click on any node and read out any parameter without affecting the circuit’s behavior in any way. With the MOSbius, you can similarly access nearly every node in a circuit, but now you face the reality that wiring up test probes to make a measurement can change the circuit’s behavior. Figuring out the most elegant way to make measurements is key for anyone hoping to see their ideas committed to silicon. The “aha” moment of seeing your circuit come to life will stay long after the equations and analysis are forgotten
MOSbius’s ability to let folks poke around inside the guts of an integrated circuit design takes inspiration from the Three Fives Discrete Timer Kit, which uses discrete components to re-create the workings of one of the most popular integrated circuits of all time, the 555. You can of course use the MOSbius to re-create a 555, as well as many other demonstration circuits, starting with the “Hello world!” of hardware, a blinking LED.
Metal-oxide transistors and commonly used subcircuits are connected to most of the pins of the MOSbius chip. They can also be wired together internally using a set of buses programmed using a 650-bit stream from a microcontroller. James Provost
The origin of the MOSbius was serendipitous: While preparing a set of students’ IC projects to be fabricated, we realized we had room to squeeze one more chip into the batch if we could meet the shipping deadline. Six weeks later, the MOSbius was off to production!
From this limited run—150 chips in total—we are making MOSbius kits available at a nominal price of US $150 (subject to change and just to recover our costs) to other educators interested in bringing it to their labs. We are also working on a revised version. The MOSbius can be used to make circuits that range in complexity from those suitable for undergraduates to graduate-level projects. The Web site has a complete set of tutorials and a lab experiments manual ready to go. If you’re interested in obtaining a kit, you can contact me through the site.
I realize we have only a small number of kits available—we are after all a university department, not a semiconductor manufacturer—but we want to make the MOSbius more broadly available to both educators and enthusiasts in the future. The best way to make that happen is to contact me, because strong demand is something we can present to a commercial partner!
2025-07-29 22:47:07
In advanced electromagnetic (EM) design, speed and accuracy are critical – especially for large antenna arrays and complex scattering problems. But traditional simulation methods often require costly, repetitive computations just to evaluate radiation patterns across different scenarios.
Our latest whitepaper, Efficient Simulation of Radiation Pattern Diagrams for Complex Electromagnetic Problems, introduces two breakthrough techniques that slash simulation time without sacrificing precision:
2025-07-29 20:00:02
Twenty years ago, Web-savvy folks were focused on solving the Internet’s “last-mile” problem. Today, by contrast, one of the biggest bottlenecks to expanding Internet access is rather around a “middle-mile” problem—crossing cities and tough terrain, not just driveways and country roads.
Taara, a spin-off of X (formerly Google X), is promoting a simple alternative to fiber-optic cables: Free-space optical lasers. Using over-the-air infrared C-band lasers, Taara is rolling out tech that the company says reliably delivers 20-gigabit-per-second bandwidth across distances up to 20 kilometers.
However, what happens to open-air laser signals on a rainy or foggy day? What about a flock of birds or stray tree branch blocking a tower’s signal? Plus, C-band communications tech is decades old. So why haven’t other innovators tried Taara’s approach before?
IEEE Spectrum spoke with Taara’s CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy about the company’s X pedigree (and its Google Fiber and Google Project Loon alumni) as well as upcoming new technologies, set to roll out in 2026, that’ll expand Taara towers’ bandwidth and range. Plus, the fledgling company’s wagering its industry footprint might get a tiny boost too.
What does Taara do, and what problem or problems is the company working to solve?
Mahesh Krishnaswamy, CEO of Taara, says the Internet’s “middle-mile” problem presents an outsize opportunity. Taara
Mahesh Krishnaswamy: Taara is a project that incubated over the last seven years at [Google/Alphabet] X Development, and we recently graduated. We’re now an independent company. It is a technology that uses eye-safe lasers to connect between two line-of-sight points, using beams of light, without having to dig trench fiber.
The problem we are really solving is that of global connectivity. Today, as we speak, close to 3 billion people are still not on the Internet. And even the 5 billion that are connected are running into challenges associated with speed, affordability, or reliability. It’s really a global problem that affects not just millions but billions of people.
So Taara is addressing the digital divide problem?
Krishnaswamy: Some of the ways our customers and partners have deployed [Taara's tech] is they use it for redundancy or to cross difficult terrain. A river, a railroad crossing, a mountain, anywhere the land is difficult to dig and traverse through, we are able to reach. One example is the Congo River, which is the world’s deepest river and one of the fastest flowing rivers. It separates Brazzaville [in the Republic of the Congo] and Kinshasa [in the Democratic Republic of the Congo]. Two separate countries on either side. But they’ve not been able to run fiber optic cables underneath the river. Because the Congo River is very fast-flowing. And so the only alternative is to go about 400 km, to where they’re able to safely navigate it. But we were able to connect these two countries very easily, and as a result, bring bandwidth parity. One side had five times higher bandwidth cost than the other side.
What is Taara doing today that couldn’t have been done 5 or 10 years ago?
Krishnaswamy: We’ve been slowly but steadily building up the improvements to this technology. This started with improvements in the optics, electronics, software algorithms, as well as pointing and tracking. We have enough margin to tackle most of the challenges that typically were limiting this technology up until recently, and we are one of the world’s largest manufacturers of terrestrial, free-space optics. We are live right now in more than 12 countries around the world—and growing every day.
What is your company’s main technological product?
Krishnaswamy: Today, the technology that we have is called Taara Lightbridge. This is our first-generation product, which is capable of doing 20 Gbps, bidirectionally, at up to 20 km distance. It’s roughly the size of a traffic light and weighs about 13 kilograms.
Taara’s traffic-light-size Lightbridge terminal serves as the hub for the company’s free-space Internet tech—with fingernail-size components being promised for 2026. Taara
But we are now about to embark on a significant sea change in our technology. We are going to take some of the core photonics and electronics components and shrink it down to the size of my fingernail. And it will be able to point, track, send, and receive light at tens of gigabits per second. We have this Taara chip in a prototype form, which is already communicating indoors at 60 meters as well as outdoors at 1 km. That is a big reveal, and this is going to be the platform by which we’re going to be building future generations of products.
When will you be launching that?
Krishnaswamy: It’ll be the end of 2026.
How does all of this relate to the tech being “middle mile” rather than what used to be called “last mile”? How much distinction is there between the two?
Krishnaswamy: If you were to follow the path of data all the way from a subsea fiber, where you have Internet landing points, there’s this very vast capacity fiber that’s bringing it all the way from the edge of the coast into some main city. That’s a longhaul fiber. These are the national backbones, usually laid by the countries. But once you bring it to the town, then the operators, the data centers, start to take it and distribute the bandwidth from there. They start down what we call the middle mile.
That’s anywhere from a few kilometers to 20 kilometers of fiber. Now in some cases they will be passing very close to a home. In some cases, they’re a little bit further out. That’s the last mile. Which is not necessarily a mile. In some cases, it’s as short as 50 meters.
Does Taara cover the whole length of the middle mile?
Krishnaswamy: Today Taara operates where we are able to bridge connections from a few kilometers to up to 20 km. That’s the middle mile that we operate in. And almost 50 percent of the world today is within 25 km of a fiber point of presence. So it’s very much accessible for us to reach most of those communities.
Now the next generation technology that I’m talking about, the photonics chip, will allow us to go even shorter distances and will allow us to close the gap on the last mile as well. So today we are mostly operating in the middle mile, and in some cases we can connect the last mile. But with the next-generation chip, we’ll be operating both in the middle mile as well as the last mile.
What about the X background? Do you have people from Project Loon or from Google Fiber now working at Taara?
Krishnaswamy: Yes. I was personally working on Project Loon, and I was leading up the manufacturing, the supply chain, and some of the operational aspects of it. But my passion was always to solve the connectivity problem. And at X we always say, fall in love with the problem, not the solution per se.
So you started using Project Loon’s open-air signaling tech that connects one Internet balloon to another, but you just did it between fixed stations on the ground?
Krishnaswamy: Yes, the idea was very simple. What if we were to bring the technology connecting balloons in the stratosphere down to the ground, and start connecting people quickly?
It was a quick and dirty way of getting started on connecting and closing out the digital gap. And little did I know that across the street, Google Access was also working on similar technology to cross freeways. So I pulled together a team from Google Access and then from Project Loon. And today the Taara team includes people from various parts of Google who worked on this technology and other connectivity projects. So it’s a team that is really passionate about connectivity globally.
OK, so what about foggy days? What about rain and snow? How does Taara technology send over-the-air infrared data traffic through inclement weather?
Krishnaswamy: Our biggest challenge is weather, particularly particulates in weather that disperse light. Fog is our biggest nemesis. And we try to avoid deploying in foggy areas. So we built a planning tool that allows us to actually predict the anticipated availability. As long as it’s light rain, and it doesn’t disperse [optical signals], then it’s fine.
A simple rule of thumb is if you can see the other side, then you should be able to close the link. We’re also exploring some smart rerouting algorithms, using mesh. Ultimately, we are subject to some environmental degradations. And it’s really how you overcome that is what we’ve been focusing on.
Why 20 km? Is Taara trying to extend that to greater distances today?
Krishnaswamy: The honest truth is it started out with one of our first customers in rural India who said, “I have many of these access points which are up to 20 km away.” And as we started to dig deeper, we realized we can connect a vast majority of the unconnected places within 20 km of a fiber point of presence. So that ended up becoming our initial specification.
How about pointing? If you’re beaming a laser out over 20 km, that’s a tiny target to aim at.
Krishnaswamy: When we deployed first in India, we ran into a lot of monkeys that we had to deal with who are territorial. There would be like 20 or 30 of these monkeys jumping and shaking the tower, and our link would always oscillate. So we can’t physically drive them away. But we could actually improve our pointing and tracking, which is exactly what we did. So we have gyroscopes and accelerometers built in. We are constantly monitoring the other side. There’s also a camera inside the terminal. So if you are really out of alignment, we can always repoint it again. But basically we have made a significant amount of improvements in our pointing and tracking. That’s one of our secret sauces.
What are the near-term hurdles for the company? Near-term ambitions?
Krishnaswamy: I used to work at Apple, so I brought some of the best practices from there as well to make this technology manufacturable. We want physics to be the upper bound of what is capable, and we don’t want any compromises.
And the last thing I’ll say is we are really pioneering the light generation. This is a complete relook at how light can be used for communication purposes, which is where we’re starting out. When you have something this small, that could deliver such high speeds at such low latencies, you could put it into robots and into self-driving cars. And it could change the landscape of communications. But if you were to not just use it for communication, it could go into lidar or biomedical devices that scan and sense. You could do a lot more using the underlying technology of phased arrays in a silicon photonics chip. There’s so much more to be done.