Contact: Josh Chamot
jchamot@nsf.gov
703-292-7730
National Science Foundation

The Incredibly Shrinking Radio

Caption: Over the past century, radio has shrunken dramatically from the wooden "cathedral" style radios of the 1930s to the pocket-sized transistor radios of the 1950s and more recently to the single-chip radios found in cell phones and wireless sensors. Continuing this trend, researchers have further miniaturized the radio by cleverly implementing multiple radio functions with a single component, the carbon nanotube. This nanotube radio is over nineteen orders-of-magnitude smaller than the Philco vacuum tube radio from the 1930s!

Credit: Courtesy Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California at Berkeley.

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