Nanosecond (ns)
One billionth of a second. Light travels about 30 cm in a nanosecond.
1 nanosecond = 1×10⁻⁹ seconds (exactly).
About the 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.
Sources: Wikipedia: Nanosecond; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Nanosecond conversion chart
1 nanosecond expressed in every other time unit:
| Unit | 1 nanosecond |
|---|---|
| Seconds | 1×10⁻⁹ |
| Minutes | 1.666666667×10⁻¹¹ |
| Hours | 2.777777778×10⁻¹³ |
| Days | 1.157407407×10⁻¹⁴ |
| Weeks | 1.653439153×10⁻¹⁵ |
| Months | 3.802648621×10⁻¹⁶ |
| Years | 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Milliseconds | 0.000001 |
| Microseconds | 0.001 |
| Decades | 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Centuries | 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁹ |
| Millennia | 3.168873851×10⁻²⁰ |
| Picoseconds | 1,000 |
| Common Years | 3.170979198×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Leap Years | 3.162315321×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Julian Years | 3.168808781×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Tropical Years | 3.16887654×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Sidereal Years | 3.168753579×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Synodic Months | 3.919350773×10⁻¹⁶ |
| Sidereal Days | 1.160576284×10⁻¹⁴ |
| Aeons | 3.168873851×10⁻²⁶ |
| Shakes | 0.1 |
| Fortnights | 8.267195767×10⁻¹⁶ |
| Score | 1.584436925×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Lustra | 6.337747701×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Olympiads | 7.922184627×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Indictions | 2.112582567×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Jubilees | 6.337747701×10⁻¹⁹ |
| Ghati | 6.944444444×10⁻¹³ |
| Muhurtas | 3.472222222×10⁻¹³ |
| Prahar | 9.259259259×10⁻¹⁴ |
| Shichen | 1.388888889×10⁻¹³ |
| Moments | 1.111111111×10⁻¹¹ |
| Ship's Watches | 6.944444444×10⁻¹⁴ |
| Kin (Maya) | 1.157407407×10⁻¹⁴ |
| Winals | 5.787037037×10⁻¹⁶ |
| Tun (Maya) | 3.215020576×10⁻¹⁷ |
| Katuns | 1.607510288×10⁻¹⁸ |
| Baktuns | 8.03755144×10⁻²⁰ |
More Metric (SI) units
- second (time)
- millisecond (time)
- microsecond (time)
- minute (time)
- hour (time)
- day (time)
- meter (length)
- kilometer (length)
- centimeter (length)
- millimeter (length)
- micrometer (length)
- nanometer (length)
- picometer (length)
- decimeter (length)
- hectometer (length)
- decameter (length)
Browse all time units.