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LARGE-AREA ELECTRONICS

Oxide electronics for 5G and 6G

Nature Electronics volume 4, pages 705–706 (2021)Cite this article

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Large-area electronics based on metal-oxide thin-film transistors can be used to create integrated phased arrays for radiofrequency front-ends in 5G — and future 6G — communication systems.

Most biomedical sensors and radiofrequency antennas collect very-low-energy signals and operate in very noisy environments. Improvements in these systems over the past few decades have mainly been achieved via advances in amplification and noise cancellation. In particular, filtering techniques are directly applied at the point where the signals are generated, which means amplifiers, filters and signal conditioning electronics in general are integrated into the sensors. This has led to the development of small systems intended for biomedical applications that can collect millivolt-level data with high accuracy. However, there are many other low-level signal sensing applications — including antennas, pressure sensors, radiofrequency identification tags (RFIDs) and energy harvesters — where data need to be collected over a relatively large surface1,2,3. In these applications, small chips on the order of 1 mm2 must be integrated with sensors or antennas that are hundreds of times larger1,4,5, which leads to complexity issues and a vulnerability to interference and noise.

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Fig. 1: Large-area electronics for phased arrays.

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  1. Democritus University of Thrace, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Xanthi, Greece

    George A. Kyriacou

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  1. George A. Kyriacou
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Correspondence to George A. Kyriacou.

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Kyriacou, G.A. Oxide electronics for 5G and 6G. Nat Electron 4, 705–706 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00659-w

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