Wi-Wi Stamp Syncs Time Wirelessly in a Nanosecond

In every industry, you’ll find systems that depend on synced operation. Imagine an assembly line where one machine tries to feed a part into a second machine before that second machine is ready to take it — disaster would follow. And the timing gets really sensitive in complex digital systems. Wi-Wi Stamp is a wireless time synchronization system that is absurdly fast and precise.

Wireless time synchronization is a big challenge. For most normal applications, like wireless routing, super-precise timing isn’t actually that important and we can get away with being “close enough.” But when timing is critical, engineers tend to resort to inconvenient wired connections. Famously, the New York Stock Exchange uses matched network cables lengths and other methods to ensure equal latency between traders, as even a small difference could impart an unfair advantage.

In this video, Jeff Geerling interviews Wi-Wi Stamp’s co-founder to dive into the technical details of the technology. Most of those are beyond my own level of understanding, but the basic gist is that the transmitters and receivers operate at 900Mhz very precisely. Conventional wireless hardware has “good enough” oscillators that work for data transmission, but don’t reach this level of precision.

As a bonus, this enables very accurate spatial triangulation. With three or more transmission devices in the system producing identical waveforms at that precise frequency, the receiving device can compare how far out of phase they are to determine its distance from each and therefore its point in 3D space.

That’s just one application and there are many other potential commercial use cases. Many technologies that previously relied on wired connections can now benefit from the flexibility of wireless synchronization, even when precision is paramount.