Since Greenerwave was created to commercialize RIS, the technology has seen increasing interest for wireless communications, with standardization starting at ETSI and 3GPP.19–22 Should RIS proceed to commercial deployment, we remain in a good position to re-enter the market. We have seminal patents years older than those of the competition, and they will be hard to bypass. Our RIS activities have been supported by European research grants in collaboration with companies such as NEC, Telecom Italia and Nokia. Our Ka-Band electronically steerable antennas are based on RIS inside a leaky cavity, so the R&D leading to steerable antennas is aligned with the development of RIS for mmWave 5G. We applied the technology to 5G beginning in 2019 through a collaboration with the Japanese firm AGC (see Figure 9), demonstrated in various experiments.23,24 AGC and NTT Docomo used our RIS as a passive access point extender for 5G mmWave networks at the end of 2021. Should the RIS market take off, we are ready for it.25

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges financial support from the European Commission, through the H2020 Project RISE-6G, HEXA-X, under grant 101015956; the H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020 METAWIRELESS project, under grant 956256; as well as funding from the French Agency Innovation Defense, under grant RAPID 3SFA and m3SFA; and funding from the French National Centre for Space Studies. All Greenerwave staff are deeply thanked for their involvement, hard work, good spirit and amazing developments, with special thanks to Dr. Jean-Baptiste Gros for preparing the figures for this article.

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