Voltage Control System for Liquid-Crystal Based Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
N. Vasyliev (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
A. Asadi – Mentor (TU Delft - Embedded Systems)
F.M.L. Portner – Mentor (TU Delft - Embedded Systems)
RangaRao Venkatesha Prasad – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Networked Systems)
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Abstract
Liquid-crystal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (LC-RIS) need hundreds of stable bias voltages, yet most existing controllers are slow, expensive, or hard to scale. This thesis prototypes a lean 64-channel driver that combines one 1 kHz NE555 square-wave source with per-channel amplitude control via daisy-chained AD5263 digital potentiometers and OPA4197 buffers. Each channel supplies a continuous ±10 V swing in 256 steps, and a Raspberry Pi Pico streams updates in 31 μs, fast enough not to limit the LC’s millisecond-scale response. The work is still a proof of concept: it has been validated only with 64 channels on the bench, long-term drift and true large-panel scaling remain open questions. Nevertheless, the prototype points toward a practical, low-cost path for future LC-RIS control.