A team of Columbia Engineering researchers have taken advantage of graphene’s special properties and have developed a nano-mechanical system that can produce FM signals and created the world’s smallest FM radio transmitter.
During the study, the team was able to use the graphene’s mechanical ‘stretchability’ to tune the output frequency of their custom oscillator, creating a nano-mechanical version of an electronic component known as a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO). They then built a graphene NEMS with a frequency around 100 MHz and used low-frequency musical signals to modulate the 100 MHz carrier signal from the graphene and then retrieved the musical signals again using an ordinary FM radio receiver.
Read more about how the world’s smallest FM radio transmitter was created.
