ECE Assistant Professor Chung-Tse Michael Wu is the recipient of a new award from the Army Research Lab (ARL) for the project “Power Efficient Metamaterial Intelligent Surfaces and Antenna Arrays using Liquid Metal-based Heterogeneous Integration.” This project is funded at $200,000 for the first year with an option to extend to $750,000 over three years.
Metamaterials (MTMs) are artificial structures with unusual properties, such as negative index of refraction, negative permittivity and permeability, which typically cannot be found in nature. Owing to these exotic electromagnetic (EM) properties, the concept of MTMs has been adopted to develop various guided and radiated wave structures with enhanced functionalities. In particular, 2D-MTMs or metasurfaces have recently gained much attention due to the capability of manipulating the transmission and reflection characteristics of EM waves. The proposed research project aims to create a new category of liquid metal based reconfigurable MTM intelligent surfaces as well as metasurface antenna arrays for next generation sensing and communication. By incorporating liquid metal into soft materials, the resulting MTM intelligent surfaces and metasurface antenna arrays can be made stretchable and bendable, thereby allowing themselves to be deployed onto conformal platforms.
Congratulations, Michael!