Terahertz to Megahertz (THz to MHz)

1 terahertz equals 1,000,000 megahertz exactly.

1 terahertz = 1,000,000 megahertz

How to convert terahertz to megahertz

To convert terahertz to megahertz, multiply the number of terahertz by 1,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megahertz by 0.000001.

megahertz = terahertz × 1,000,000

Example: 10 terahertz = 10,000,000 megahertz.

About these units

Terahertz (THz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

10¹² hertz. Infrared radiation lies at tens of terahertz.

A trillion cycles each second is the scale where electronics meets optics. The terahertz, 10 to the power 12 hertz, takes its base unit from Heinrich Hertz, the physicist who gave conclusive proof that electromagnetic waves exist. The IEC established the name hertz in 1935, and the CGPM adopted it in 1960, replacing cycles per second and its multiples such as kilocycles and megacycles.

Radiation between 0.1 and 10 THz, with wavelengths from 3 mm down to 30 micrometres, lies between microwaves and far infrared. For years this stretch was called the terahertz gap, because practical sources and detectors were hard to build. Today it is used for security screening, spectroscopy and imaging, and has been proposed for fast wireless links. Infrared light spans roughly tens of terahertz, and visible light is about 400 to 790 THz.

1 terahertz = 1,000,000,000,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Hertz; Wikipedia: Terahertz radiation; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (frequency)

Megahertz (MHz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million hertz. FM radio and older processors.

Engineers once said megacycles, and the older unit shows up in postwar papers, one 1946 study on ultrasound in liquids being titled with 15 megacycles. When hertz replaced cycles per second, the megacycle per second, Mc/s, became the megahertz. The word then entered home computing: Wikipedia notes personal computer clock speeds of around 1 MHz in the late 1970s on machines from Atari, Commodore and Apple.

A megahertz is one million hertz, the natural scale of broadcast radio. FM stations in most of the world use 87.5 to 108 MHz, with the Americas using 88 to 108 MHz and Japan using 76 to 95 MHz. In North America channels are spaced 200 kHz apart, and the FCC reassigned FM to its present band in 1945. As a way to rate computers, clock speed is criticised by many experts, who call it an easily manipulable benchmark because some chips need several cycles per operation and others perform several operations in one.

1 megahertz = 1,000,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Megahertz; Wikipedia: FM broadcast band

Related conversions

See all frequency units.