Wireless Just Beat Fiber Optics

Wireless network connections offer portability and convenience, but if you have a need for speed, you’ve got to plug in. Wi-Fi and 5G cellular may be quite fast these days; however, they can’t rival the throughput of a fiber optic connection. Everyone knows this. It’s an established fact. Or is it? A team of engineers at UC Irvine would disagree, and they have the numbers to back up their claim.

They have developed a blazing-fast wireless transceiver that transmits data at a rate of 15 gigabytes per second. That’s 24 times faster than standard 5G and 4 times faster than the theoretical maximum transfer speed of Wi-Fi 7. Not only does this put existing wireless technologies to shame, but it even beats a typical data center’s fiber optic connection by about 20%.

The team has created a new silicon chip transceiver capable of operating at frequencies as high as 140 gigahertz. Working in this rarely used F-band spectrum allows the system to unlock massive bandwidth, making wireless links that behave more like fiber optic cables — without the physical wires.

Traditional high-speed wireless systems rely heavily on digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters, components that become extremely power-hungry as data rates climb. According to the project lead, these converters create an unavoidable performance wall. Push them too far, and chips overheat or drain batteries in minutes.

To get around this bottleneck, the researchers shifted much of the signal processing into the analog domain. Their transmitter eliminates the digital-to-analog converter entirely, constructing complex radio signals directly at radio frequencies using three synchronized sub-transmitters. This approach allows the chip to generate advanced modulation schemes like 64QAM while consuming only a fraction of the power required by conventional designs.

On the receiving end, the team took a similarly unconventional path. Instead of digitizing the entire incoming signal at once, the receiver uses a method called hierarchical analog demodulation. The signal is progressively simplified in analog hardware before being converted to digital data, dramatically reducing power consumption. Fabricated in a 22-nanometer fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process, the receiver consumes just 230 milliwatts — low enough for portable and edge devices.

Using this technology, ultra-fast, low-power wireless links could ultimately replace dense bundles of cables inside data centers, cutting costs, heat, and energy use. They could also enable new forms of machine-to-machine communication for robotics, autonomous systems, and future 6G networks.

There are still challenges ahead, particularly range, as extremely high frequencies do not travel far. But with additional work, the long-standing gap between wireless and fiber may finally be closing.