Non-Volatile RF Reconfigurable Antenna on Flexible Substrate for Wireless IoT Applications

• Main Authors: Ting Leng, Kewen Pan, Xinyao Zhou, Yize Li, Mahmoud A. Abdalla, Zhirun Hu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Switching frequency; telecommunication switching; antennas
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9521490/

To date semiconductor switches are still the main enablers for electrical circuit and system reconfigurability. They however not only consume dynamic power but also dissipate static power, the former for performing on/off operation and latter for holding on/off state. These semiconductor devices are volatile and not energy efficient due to the need for holding voltage and can significantly increase the system power consumption where hundreds and thousands of switches are needed, such as in large reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and large antenna arrays. In this work, we report a non-volatile reconfigurable antenna that can switch between dual-band at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz to a single band at 3 GHz. The measured results including reflection, gain and radiation patterns reveal promising performance, experimentally demonstrating a new approach of design and realization of RF switch integrated multi-band reconfigurable antennas. This zero-static power mechanism, along with easy fabrication on the flexible substrates would be very beneficial for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.