ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 2 -- United States Patent no. 12,646,854, issued on June 2, was assigned to Dell Products LP (Round Rock, Texas).

"Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces with dual mode signal propagation in transmission and reflection space" was invented by Navjot Kaur Khaira (Kanata, Canada), Tejinder Singh (Kanata, Canada) and Morris Repeta (Ottawa).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A reconfigurable intelligent surface is disclosed. The reconfigurable intelligent surface includes a switch layer that can transition to a metallic state from an insulator state and to the insulator state from the metallic state based on its temperature. A voltage is applied to the switch layer to control the tem...