Researchers at Seoul National University have unveiled STARE, a wafer-level reconfigurable intelligent surface system that could revolutionise the production of 6G beam-steering hardware, bringing industry closer to mass production of intelligent radio surfaces.
Researchers in South Korea have unveiled a wafer-level antenna platform that could change how 6G beam-steering hardware is made, moving the industry closer to semiconductor-style mass production of intelligent radio surfaces. The system, called STARE, was developed by a team led by Professor Jungsuek Oh at Seoul National University and is described in Nature Communications as the first reconfigurable intelligent surface designed for foundry-style fabrication on a single wafer.
At its core, STARE combines antennas and RF switches on the same silicon wafer rather than building them separately and joining them later. The Nature paper says the design uses custom Selective Overlap Diodes embedded in high-resistivity silicon, allowing low-power operation while providing tunable resistance and capacitance. In tests, the device achieved 180-degree phase control and beam steering from minus 45 degrees to plus 45 degrees at 15.5 GHz, which the authors say makes it the first RIS architecture ready for semiconductor foundries.
The significance is not only technical but industrial. Traditional reconfigurable surfaces and antenna arrays become harder to build as element counts rise, because they depend on many discrete parts, interconnections and assembly steps. The Seoul team argues that folding switching and radiating elements into one wafer removes a major manufacturing bottleneck. The result is a flatter structure with fewer protruding parts, lower losses and a route to smaller, cheaper hardware for dense antenna arrays.
The researchers also addressed a longstanding design problem: antenna engineering and chip design have usually been treated as separate disciplines. According to the paper, the team created a co-design method that feeds measured device behaviour back into the electromagnetic model, so the switch and antenna are optimised together. They also eliminated the need for through-silicon vias by using magnetic coupling between metal structures on opposite sides of the wafer, reducing complexity and energy loss.
The broader applications are wide-ranging. Seoul National University says the platform could be adapted for base-station and satellite antennas, thin beam-steering panels, integrated sensing and communication systems, industrial robotics, low-Earth-orbit links, wireless power transfer and data-centre connectivity. Professor Oh said the work bridges semiconductor fabrication and radio-frequency systems, and that the next steps include larger wafers and multilevel phase control. That ambition reflects a wider push across the field: recent reviews and industry work from VTT, IMEC and Institute of Science Tokyo all point to transmit-array designs, low-loss interposers and compact sub-terahertz circuits as key building blocks for practical 6G systems.
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