Engineers at North Carolina State University have devised a new form of tiny, liquid-metal antenna that's capable of tuning into a wide range of radio frequencies, offering a timely solution to a looming and potentially damning problem in networked electronics—namely, the limits of the radio spectrum itself.

If this whole Internet of Things project is going to work, we'll need better and, crucially, more ways to communicate with it. Simply, the IoT means a whole lot of new devices and sensors begging for bandwidth that's already in increasingly short supply with smart-phones alone communicating via wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, and 4G, each one of those requiring antennas of different shapes and wavelengths. This situation will only get worse.

Making it all work will require antennas that can serve multiple purposes, e.g. adaptive radio communication enabled by reconfigurable radiofrequency (RF) electronics. Reconfiguring is difficult, however, and requires a bunch of added complexity in the forms of more switches and more components, with the result being a radio device that's reconfigurable, but only within a limited range.

Enter liquid metal-based antennas, which allow for communication across wider sections of the radio spectrum thanks to their ability to change length—physically morphing to acquire different signals. But, as the North Carolina researchers explain in a paper published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, this presents its own set of problems in the form of still more complexity, e.g. more moving parts.