Wave Shine is making a ‘mirror’ for 6G frequencies and it looks really useful. SemiAccurate saw the company at CES and was quite impressed with the tech.
Wave Shine chips and antenna blocks
The heart of the Wave Shine RIS or Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces is a tiny little chip made on Samsung’s 28nm process. You can barely see a couple in black packaging under the magnifier above, they are dwarfed by the antenna array to their right. Take several of these antenna arrays and put them in a 30x30cm pizza box case and you have an RIS. It is low power, claimed <1W, so it can be battery operated if needed, or just plugged in to power, the chip needs a 5V supply. Those specs are nice but, umm, what does the RIS actually do?
The short story is that it is basically a mirror for 6G frequencies, specifically 7.7-8.5GHz at the moment but there isn’t really a reason the same tech can’t work for just about any band. The chip itself handles a 2D array of 256 antennas, 16×16 or 4×4 of the antenna blocks above so it is quite capable of beamforming. While we won’t get into the math of beamforming, just realize it can tell very precisely where a signal is coming from by the timing of the signal hitting each antenna. Since the array is 2D, it can place the signal in X and Y coordinates.
Wave Shine configuration app
So far that sounds like a party trick, but wait there’s more! It then re-transmits the signal back out using the same beamforming tech, so the Wave Shine RIS is essentially a mirror for 6G signals. This is all controlled via the phone app pictured above so it isn’t just guesswork, you can actually be precise. Better yet since beamforming sending is active, it can be at arbitrary angles, receive is passive, you can pull off lots of useful tricks.
If you put a RIS on the wall, as long as the signal is coming in at >60 degrees angle of incidence, you can re-transmit that signal at any angle in X or Y that is >60 degrees. Angle of incidence != angle of reflection when you are dealing with active beamforming but it is otherwise just a ‘mirror’ for 6G frequencies.
Why is this useful? Imagine you live or work in a dead spot, or a low signal spot. Take a RIS, put it on a pole or beside that big building that shades your house and aim the signal. Problem solved. If you have an old hose with metal lathe in the walls like, oh say me, you can put one in a window and light up the entire house. Industrial shop floor with lots of 6G IOT signals going around large metal machines? Slap a few RIS’s on the walls and off you go.
In short the idea behind the Wave Shine RIS is pretty simple. Take a beamforming antenna, slap an intelligent controller on it, and make an adjustable ‘mirror’ for 6G frequencies. A simple app can tell you where the signal is coming from so you can adjust the ‘reflection’ to wherever you want it to go. The implementation may be complex but the end product is pretty simple. Better yet it is self-contained, low power, and likely doesn’t require any licenses. What more could you ask for?S|A
