With the growing number of users and devices, WiFi and mobile networks are at risk of becoming overloaded, ultimately leading to slower internet speeds. The increasing demands on home and industrial infrastructures are becoming harder to meet, with artificial intelligence adding an extra push to this challenge.

However, scientists at the University of Florida have proposed a potential solution: 3D chips.

At first glance, the idea of transitioning from flat, 2D processors to three-dimensional ones might sound odd. Traditional wireless communication relies on these planar processors, which can only handle a limited range of frequencies at any given time. Moving to 3D chip construction could change this, enabling the handling of multiple frequencies simultaneously, as revealed in a publication in the journal _Nature Electronics_.

Roozbeh Tabrizian, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida and the leader of the team behind this development, compared the current networks' challenges to city traffic.

"A city infrastructure can only handle so much traffic. If you increase the number of cars, you run into problems," Tabrizian elaborated. He noted that we are nearing the peak of effectively movable data volume, and at this point, the planar construction of processors is simply not practical, significantly limiting the usable frequency ranges.

In their study, the researchers describe a chip with multiple processors, each capable of handling different frequencies. This could result in significant performance enhancements and better scalability, according to Gizmodo.

It is yet unclear when this development might be implemented in real-world applications.