Reconfigurable Surface Wave Platform Using Fluidic Conductive Structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reconfigurable surface wave platform using liquid metal to create energy-efficient, adaptable pathways for surface wave transmission, demonstrating significant gain and low loss in simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel liquid metal-based reconfigurable platform for surface wave routing, enabling dynamic pathway creation with high energy efficiency and low signal loss.

Findings

25 dB electric field gain at 35λ distance

Less than 1 dB loss at 50λ distance

Pathways with turns have only 3.5 dB loss

Abstract

Surface wave inherently has less propagation loss as it adheres to the surface and minimizes unwanted dissipation in space. Recently, they find applications in network-on-chip (NoC) communications and intelligent surface aided mobile networked communications. This paper puts forward a reconfigurable surface wave platform (RSWP) that utilizes liquid metal to produce highly energy-efficient and adaptive pathways for surface wave transmission. Our simulation results illustrate that the proposed RSWP using Galinstan can obtain a $25{\rm dB}$ gain in the electric field for a propagation distance of $35\lambda$ at $30{\rm GHz}$ where $\lambda$ denotes the wavelength. Moreover, less than $1{\rm dB}$ loss is observed even at a distance of $50\lambda$, and a pathway with right-angled turns can also be created with only a $3.5{\rm dB}$ loss at the turn.