Milliseconds to Nanoseconds (ms to ns)
1 millisecond equals 1,000,000 nanoseconds exactly.
How to convert milliseconds to nanoseconds
To convert milliseconds to nanoseconds, multiply the number of milliseconds by 1,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply nanoseconds by 0.000001.
nanoseconds = milliseconds × 1,000,000
Example: 10 milliseconds = 10,000,000 nanoseconds.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Millisecond (ms)
One thousandth of a second. Used for computer response times and sports timing.
Milliseconds sit on the border between what people perceive and what instruments must be built to catch. Nobody feels a single one: a human blink lasts roughly 100 to 400 of them, and the average resting heart cycle is about 860. The prefix milli- makes the unit exactly one thousandth of a second, so it is a handy yardstick for events a little too quick to notice but slow enough for a stopwatch-style instrument to capture.
A millisecond is one thousandth of a second, and the scale references are easy to picture. Light in a vacuum covers about 300 km in 1 ms, and sound in air covers about 34 cm. A film frame at 24 frames per second lasts about 41.7 ms, one cycle of 60 Hz mains power lasts about 16.7 ms, and a camera shutter set to 1/125 s is open for about 8 ms. Online gamers watch network latency in milliseconds, with typical broadband figures of 5 to 80 ms, and telephone engineers recommend keeping one-way delay under about 150 ms before conversation starts to feel awkward.
1 millisecond = 0.001 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Millisecond; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Nanosecond (ns)
One billionth of a second. Light travels about 30 cm in a nanosecond.
Few units are as easy to picture as the nanosecond, because light makes it concrete. In a vacuum, light needs about 3.34 nanoseconds to travel one metre and about 1.02 nanoseconds to travel one foot. That is why engineers talk about wire lengths and signal delays in the same breath once clocks reach the gigahertz range, where the cycle time of a 1 GHz signal is exactly one nanosecond.
A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, and the ratio is hard to grasp: one nanosecond is to one second as one second is to about 31.7 years. It is the natural unit of fast digital hardware. A 74HC-series logic chip common in the mid-1980s had a typical propagation delay of about 8 ns, and the gap between packets on Gigabit Ethernet is 96 ns. The Go language's time package offers 1 ns precision.
1 nanosecond = 1×10⁻⁹ seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Nanosecond; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Related conversions
- Nanoseconds to milliseconds (reverse)
- Milliseconds to seconds
- Milliseconds to minutes
- Milliseconds to hours
- Milliseconds to days
- Milliseconds to weeks
- Milliseconds to months
- Milliseconds to years
- Milliseconds to microseconds
- Milliseconds to decades
- Milliseconds to centuries
- Milliseconds to millennia
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Minutes to nanoseconds
- Hours to nanoseconds
- Days to nanoseconds
- Weeks to nanoseconds
- Months to nanoseconds
- Years to nanoseconds
- Microseconds to nanoseconds
- Decades to nanoseconds
- Centuries to nanoseconds
- Millennia to nanoseconds
See all time units.