Collaborative Research: Reconfigurable Intelligent Electromagnetic Surface Using Magnetic Shape Memory Polymers

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The ability to dynamically manipulate electromagnetic waves by a flat aperture will lead to the realization of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). This vision includes implementing such reconfigurable surfaces at cell tower base stations to increase capacity and serve more users for 5G and beyond wireless systems in both outdoor and indoor settings. Moreover, dynamic and arbitrary manipulation of electromagnetic wavefronts is an exciting and versatile tool for next-generation wireless communication, imaging, holography, surveillance, and sensing applications. Reconfigurability or programmability is a vital feature of such future agile radio frequency systems. Reconfigurable devices or circuits (e.g., diodes and variable capacitors) have been used in such smart systems to control radiation pattern, polarization, or operating frequency. This project investigates a new approach of using programmable soft materials, for the first time, on RIS. The new approach offers unique advantages over the state-of-art technologies. This project is an interdisciplinary and collaborative effort between the mmWave Antennas and Arrays Laboratory (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology) and the Soft Intelligent Materials Laboratory (Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University).The research of this project is transformative as it challenges the conventional methods that have been applied to control RIS and reconfigure those wireless systems using them. The new approach is based on a viable mechanical reconfiguration method using shape memory polymers and magnetic actuation. Thus, unlike other state-of-the-art technologies, semiconductor switching devices such as diodes are no longer needed inside each unit cell. The advantage of this global reconfiguration method becomes even more important for large intelligent surfaces. In contrast to traditional reconfiguration schemes that use semiconductor devices such as diodes, the new architecture utilizes a unique and purely mechanical deformation that does not suffer from loss and nonlinearity associated with traditional semiconductor devices. In this project, researchers will use magnetically responsive soft materials to drive the multimodal mechanical shape reconfigurations of the RIS under an external magnetic field with several tens of millitesla. The project is expected to demonstrate several advantages of the new approach over existing state-of-art technologies, including programmability enabled by magnetic excitation, linearity, scalability, low operating voltage, low loss, and multimodal reconfiguration.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.