Milliwatt (mW)
One thousandth of a watt. Used for lasers and small electronics.
1 milliwatt = 0.001 watts (exactly).
About the milliwatt
A thousandth of a watt sounds negligible, but it is the working scale for a great deal of light and signal technology. A common laser pointer emits about five milliwatts of light, and a hearing aid draws less than one. The watt is named for James Watt, with the name proposed by C. William Siemens in 1882 and the unit placed in the SI by the General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960, and the milliwatt simply applies the standard milli prefix to it.
Radio and audio engineers use the milliwatt as a zero point. A level in dBm is a power measured in decibels relative to one milliwatt, so 0 dBm is exactly 1 mW and each 10 dB step multiplies or divides the power by ten. One milliwatt is 0.001 watt, 1,000 microwatts, and 10,000 ergs per second in the older CGS system, since one watt equals 10 million ergs per second.
Sources: Wikipedia: Watt
Milliwatt conversion chart
1 milliwatt expressed in every other power unit:
| Unit | 1 milliwatt |
|---|---|
| Watts | 0.001 |
| Kilowatts | 0.000001 |
| Horsepower | 0.00000134102209 |
| Megawatts | 1×10⁻⁹ |
| Gigawatts | 1×10⁻¹² |
| Metric Horsepower | 0.000001359621617 |
| BTU Per Hour | 0.003412141633 |
| Electrical Horsepower | 0.000001340482574 |
| Foot-pounds Per Second | 0.0007375621493 |
| Tons Of Refrigeration | 2.843451361×10⁻⁷ |
| Kilocalories Per Hour | 0.0008604206501 |
| Calories Per Second | 0.0002390057361 |
| Ergs Per Second | 10,000 |
| Poncelets | 0.000001019716213 |
More Metric (SI) units
- watt (power)
- kilowatt (power)
- megawatt (power)
- gigawatt (power)
- metric horsepower (power)
- meter (length)
- kilometer (length)
- centimeter (length)
- millimeter (length)
- micrometer (length)
- nanometer (length)
- picometer (length)
- decimeter (length)
- hectometer (length)
- decameter (length)
- kilogram (weight & mass)
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