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Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G (interestingengineering.com) 48

Posted by BeauHD from the next-gen-tech dept.
Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software. Interesting Engineering reports: The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time. It's the first time anyone has made an antenna that can do all these things simultaneously, marking a significant breakthrough in this field.

The antenna is special because it can be used in advanced information systems, like the ones we might have in the future. It's great for handling a lot of data and keeping that data very safe. It can also transfer power wirelessly, meaning it can charge devices without physical connections. One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals, adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations.

Although demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies using specific technologies, enabling applications in augmented reality, holography, integrated sensing and communications for 6G, quantum optics, and quantum information science, noted the researchers in their study. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G More

Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G

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  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Malays2b0wen ( 10422574 ) on Saturday December 16, 2023 @02:16AM (#64085403)
    It will cause ED, beam Ebola into your lungs, and even lead will not stoo the gov't thought waves... But in reality it will just be more overhyped crap, and will give "them" another excuse to force-obsolite your 4G and 5G equipment. It's like a teleporter beam to extract green stuff from your wallet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Just watch them defending their well-known and safe 5G equipment when the time comes.

      • Right now it's just a lab experiment, but it seems like the 6G hype machine is already being primed and readied. And when they have it going full steam, we will be bombarded with ads hyping 6G to hell and back, and carriers all over the world will be typing up their notices in advance of how "5G will be switching off at XX/XX/20XX" and hawking the latest, 'greatest' 6G phones so you will still have data or even voice.. And nevermind the never mentioned shortcomings and sudden dead zones that will come to li

  • Software Defined Radio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Saturday December 16, 2023 @02:27AM (#64085411)

    So, this sounds like a highly evolved SDR; Are there special caveats about the frequency bands it is able to transmit/receive on?

    This could be a very handy thing indeed if it is fully broad-spectrum. (that also means, of course, the FCC would get real bitchy about the firmware controlling it...)

    • I saw a talk at a radar conference in Washington DC years ago about focussing the industry into building chips to do this kind of stuff, given by some high ranking US vice secretary of defense or something. "We need to be ahead of the Chinese." A lot of the audience were Chinese students and researchers...

      • A lot of the audience were Chinese students and researchers...

        And? Chinese outnumber Americans nearly 4 to 1, it stands to reason that at a conference attended by international students and researches the Chinese would be there in large numbers. The reality is there are a lot of Chinese students and researchers period, at all conferences.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      To do things like beam forming you need multiple antennas. If they can do everything with one compact antenna, it would be great for mobile devices.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by kenh ( 9056 )

        It's (obviously) more properly described as an antenna system, not just an antenna, but that's nit-picking.

        One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals,

        OK

        adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations.

        No, it doesn't - it does not prevent anyone from "eavesdropping" or "listening in" on a conversation. It does not encrypt the signal, and it does nothing to keep a signal secure except focus the bulk of theradio signal in a particular direction. Anyone in the nearby vicinity of the antenna can likely hear the signal no matter where it is being directed, and anyone in the direction the antenna system

        • Aegis system clone for communication purposes?

          Directional, beam forming, variable power, seems to fit. It's still interesting if they got it into a smaller package.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by XXongo ( 3986865 )

          It's (obviously) more properly described as an antenna system, not just an antenna, but that's nit-picking.

          One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals,

          OK

          adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations.

          No, it doesn't - it does not prevent anyone from "eavesdropping" or "listening in" on a conversation.

          True. You can't make an antenna beam radio waves out perfectly in one and only one direction unless the antenna is infinitely large; diffraction means that some of the radiation will go in other directions. But, you can decrease the amount going in other directions, and make it harder to listen from some location other than the receiver location.

          In general, though, this means making the antenna larger. We already know how to do this; dish antennas, phased array antennas. Not sure what's new here.

          Almost so

          • This is an evolution of what (some) cell towers currently do, and it's even appeared (in a very basic form) in some home WiFi routers.

            5G Cell Tower - https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/... [ieee.org]

            WiFi Router - https://kb.netgear.com/25347/W... [netgear.com]

          • Not sure what's new here.

            The main idea is that it's a reconfigurable surface---you can change the properties of the antenna radiation by low-power electrical control of the surface itself (as opposed to a pile of power-hungry phased-array elements), and you can independently control aspects of the wave that are difficult to control without a substantial phased array. Really, it's an incremental improvement on our ability to shape EM waves however we like.

            It's not particularly directional--size does matter for that. Instead, their s

    • So, this sounds like a highly evolved SDR; Are there special caveats about the frequency bands it is able to transmit/receive on?

      These types of antennas typically have narrow bandwidths. That's fine for some applications, but not others. In general, antennas can be scaled to a wide range of different "center frequencies", but you care about the bandwidth a lot depending on your application. (There's a relationship between your maximum data transfer rate and the frequency range over which you need to be able to operate.)

      I just skimmed the paper, but it looks like they're showing modulation on the order of a half-dozen megahertz of ban

      • For others convenience, the part of the paper describing the actual antenna

        For easy integration with other components, here we adopt the SIW as the waveguiding structure, which uses two parallel rows of metallic via holes and the thin dielectric substrate to realize the rectangular waveguide in planar form. Two ±45o inclined elliptical slot openings are etched on the top metallic surface of the SIW. The lattice size of the unit cell along the x-direction is 2mm, corresponding to 0.1580.

        Each slot opening works as a polarizable magnetic dipole whose extracted electric field polarization is perpendicular to the long side of the slot. The slot meta-atom is intentionally designed at an off-resonance state by carefully tuning the geometric parameters of the slot opening.

        Four PIN diodes (MACOMMADP-000907-14020x) are placed across the capacitive gaps of the slot openings in each meta-atom (Fig. 1b). A DC bias circuit is integrated into the meta-atom design. The circuit consists of a fan-shaped bias line (for radiofrequency choking) on the bottom biasing circuitry and a control via connecting the top meta-atom to the bottom biasing circuitry. We directly utilize the vias fences that existed in the SIW as the control vias to alleviate the perturbation of the bias network on the guided wave. Two PIN diodes in the same slot opening are biased in the same state, while PIN diodes in different inclined slot openings are biased and controlled independently.

        As someone who simulates the analog side of antenna emissions for a living a fancy controlled leaky feeder'ish design sounds like there will be pain in my job in the future.

        Getting the information from specific 5g manufacturers about the phasing configs/limits their radio units drive their beamforming phased arrays was bad enough.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cats-paw ( 34890 )

      It is not a highly evolved SDR.
      It is a highly evolved antenna.
      An SDR is a radio which can, through the magic of DSP, understand the signals presented to it, and can change itself on-the-fly to understand FM, AM or whatever modulation you program it to understand.

      This is, at it's core, an extremely flexible antenna. It is controlling the various parameters that can be attributed to an electromagnetic waves by manipulating meta material elements. meta materials can be thought of electronic devices that are on

  • Now do it for the visual light range for a window style infinite depth of field, all angle 3-D display

    • That's in 7G.

    • Not for nothing but, it seems like you don't really need eyes to see with the teraherz range. Teraherz frequencies can easily see through solid materials. Your phone will be able to map the local area with efficiency.

      I bet that's going to drive the tinfoil hatters nuts.

      this link from 2018 [etsmtl.ca] gives a 5 dollar overview of the concept.

  • Optics (Score:2)

    by mattr ( 78516 )

    Wow. It does seem there are a bunch of other people working on metamaterial optics.. first time I saw the term meta-atom, and I guess this team put it all together first? I wonder in optical regime with eyetracking, could this enable a 3D display in which individual pixels are assigned to beam into individual eyes, so that goggles are no longer needed? Apparently you will not see much of anything if not in the main beamline.

  • Waiting on 10G myself....lolol. Tongue in cheek....
  • Along with all its other wonderous abilities?
  • FTA: "The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time."

    Uh-huh. Tell us more!

    "'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independent

    • There are actually useful advances in antenna engineering here that are things you can't just do in software.

      • There are actually useful advances in antenna engineering here that are things you can't just do in software.

        IT's pretty mature technology at this point. All of the things that they claim have been implemented before. Antennas are passive devices. Let's take a look.

        The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are:

        Okay, we have gain and unless they've discovered new physics, it'll be done at the board level. Now you could adjust that mechanically by doing some really strange things like changing antenna length and using reactance or inductance to retune it while it isn't as efficient. But that's not likely to eve

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      You should read the paper.

      • You should read the paper.

        Having read the paper, I see nothing I said incorrectly. I'll note make my living with this stuff, and if you can show me how I am mistaken, I'll be pretty grateful.

        To be certain my point is that an antenna is a passive device, and any and all manipulation is done via circuitry. At one time, we did this using analogue devices, today it is largely performed in software. To see precisely what I wrote:

        But seriously, the antenna in and of itself is just living it's best life as an antenna. All of the magic

        • You're clearly not an antenna engineer. From the way you talk, I think probably not even an RF engineer. You do sound a lot like comm engineers I know that seem to think that everything is done with SDRs and the antennas are just trivial things to be purchased, though.

          All of that is the circuitry and the programming for it is part of the radio, not the antenna.

          If indeed you actually do make a living doing this (as you claim), you need to catch up with the state of the art... because you clearly don't understand what's going on here.

          • You're clearly not an antenna engineer. From the way you talk, I think probably not even an RF engineer. You do sound a lot like comm engineers I know that seem to think that everything is done with SDRs and the antennas are just trivial things to be purchased, though.

            You appear to think that insults are some kind of argument tactic. You have already been challenged to tell me what I said that is wrong. And you have proven incapable of it. So unless you can explain how this antenna is doing all it claims to do with nothing more than an antenna, you simply look like a foolish rando troll on the intertoobz. What I have said is quite simple, An antenna is an antenna - and its control system is a control system. In this case the controls for the antenna component are impleme

  • Dumbfone and dialup usrs fear nothing from the 6G  fraudsterz. Green remains in wallet beside  its pals.  Ones secretary or man-of-business can handle the edge-cases. Truly personal communication   of-course ought to be done with pen & ink ... such as the PARKER so very reasonably priced. 

  • But can it also be scaled down? (Score:3)

    by ve3oat ( 884827 ) on Saturday December 16, 2023 @09:59AM (#64085743) Homepage

    demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies

    As an amateur radio operator, my first question is Can it be scaled down in frequency, perhaps to the 20 metre band (14 MHz)? I have no interest whatsoever in THz frequencies, but an antenna with such controllable parameters as the article claims would be very useful for operating on amateur radio bands in the 1.8 to 30 MHz spectrum.

    • Of course! ... But beamforming antennas at frequencies that low would be _extremely_ large, so you probably wouldn't want it!

      (Additionally, atmospheric propagation at those frequencies is very different than in the GHz or THz, so it would be less useful to you, anyway.)

  • "Therefore, the amplitude of the extracted PW of the UMA can be tuned by changing the modulation depth M (Fig. 1k). Finally, our UMA can generate arbitrary polarization by controlling the amplitude ratio and phase difference of the extracted |u and |v components. To this end, we apply equivalent sinusoidal amplitude distributions with an identical spatial period to both the ±45o-inclined slot openings such that the extracted |u and |v components share the same output angle in free space. " Well, duh!

  • Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G

    Can I use it for regular 6G signals, not just "ultra-secure" ones? /s (*sigh*)

  • So the point is they made the antenna needed to improve next generation cell signals? Or did they simply make a more adaptable device than most? Sure it's neat, and I assume useful. And sorry, I don't have that perfect title either. Just annoyed at the click-bait feel, and limited info it gave.

    Did they do anything 100% new? Or is this just "beamforming"? What they describe is what I assumed was happening already. Probably I just expected way more from the tech than they gave.

    And please stop with the

    • Did they do anything 100% new? Or is this just "beamforming"?

      It's right there in the summary, beam forming forms only two of the list of properties of an EM wave that this antenna claims to be able to manipulate. Yes, there's new stuff here.

      And please stop with the 6G, 7G, 8G, ... just because a number goes up, doesn't mean it's worth anything.

      No one has said anything about worth. 5G as a standard is defined and has no use for this antenna. The roadmap for 6G is currently in a technological exploration phase and that involves seeing what new and novel RF technologies can be adopted. This is how technology develops. While something is being deployed, the boffins are inve

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