Graphene is enabling a plethora of applications in a wide range of fields due
to its unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. In the realm of
wireless communications, graphene shows great promise for the implementation of
miniaturized and tunable antennas in the terahertz band. These unique
advantages open the door to new reconfigurable antenna structures which, in
turn, enable novel communication protocols at different levels of the stack.
This paper explores both aspects by, first, presenting a terahertz
Yagi-Uda-like antenna concept that achieves reconfiguration both in frequency
and beam direction simultaneously. Then, a programmable antenna controller
design is proposed to expose the reconfigurability to the PHY and MAC layers,
and several examples of its applicability are given. The performance and cost
of the proposed scheme is evaluated through full-wave simulations and
comparative analysis, demonstrating reconfigurability at nanosecond granularity
with overheads below 0.02 mm2 and 0.2 mW.Comment: Accepted for presentation in IEEE WCNC '1