Nanoseconds to Microseconds (ns to µs)

1 nanosecond equals 0.001 microseconds exactly.

1 nanosecond = 0.001 microseconds

How to convert nanoseconds to microseconds

To convert nanoseconds to microseconds, multiply the number of nanoseconds by 0.001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply microseconds by 1,000.

microseconds = nanoseconds × 0.001

Example: 10 nanoseconds = 0.01 microseconds.

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

Nanosecond (ns)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

Microsecond (µs)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One millionth of a second. Used for electronics and processor timing.

Writing a microsecond takes a Greek letter, mu, which stands for the prefix micro-, one millionth. Where plain text cannot display it, people fall back on the letter u and write us. The unit belongs to electronics and radio: a signal that repeats every microsecond has a frequency of 1 MHz, and a radio wave of that period is about 300 m long.

A microsecond is one millionth of a second, short enough that light in a vacuum crosses only about 1 km in 3.34 of them. Digital audio lives on this scale, because a CD sample at 44.1 kHz lasts about 22.7 microseconds and a 48 kHz sample about 20.8. A modern solid-state drive has an access latency of about 50 microseconds, and a camera flash lasts around 1,000. Relativity matters at this scale too: GPS satellite clocks would drift by about 38 microseconds per day without compensation. Wikipedia notes that the 2011 Japanese earthquake shortened the day by about 1.8 microseconds.

1 microsecond = 0.000001 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Microsecond; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition

Related conversions

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