4D mmW/5G Metasurfaces and Wireless Sensors Combining Additive Manufacturing, Morphing and ML Technologies

Abstract

The paper will introduce fully printed 4D metasurfaces and wireless sensors operating up to 5G/mmW frequency range. Multiple morphing (shape-changing) approaches will be presented for massively scalable additively manufactured implementations , while modulation, signal redirection and energy harvesting features will be thoroughly covered in terms of integrability, flexibility and power consumption requirements. The talk will also refer to multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) being enabled by newly reported fully printed planar lenses (Rotman, Van Atta, …) and dielectric reflectarrays enabling ultra long interrogation ranges when combined with “zero-power” backscattering interrogation techniques. Major challenges of flexible hybrid electronic implementations as well as ultra-low-power printable structures for self-diagnostic and anti-counterfeiting packages will be discussed in depth and numerous ML techniques will be comparatively evaluated for their optimization, calibration and on-demand reconfigurability. The paper will conclude with fully printable mmW/5G RF modules for wireless sensing applications spanning a wide range of fully passive tags to energy autonomous long-range RFID systems and low-cost miniaturized tags for orientation and rotational sensing for VR applications as well as environmental sensing and structural health monitoring.