* Direct microwaves at different parts of the food differently. That way you can cook some stuff lots while leaving other parts cold.
* Detect which parts of the food are cooked - by watching the absorption of microwaves across a broad range of frequencies, you should be able to detect chemical reactions that happen at certain temperatures - eg. ice turning to water, or raw egg becoming cooked egg.
Combine these two things, and you can cook food far 'better' - and get all of your meat to the perfect temperature while overcooking none.
Notably, I don't think you need phased array antennas to do this. A few bits of spinning metal to scatter microwaves in random directions could instead be controlled by servos and lots of maths to send microwaves in very specific directions.
And as long as you make sure you have feedback, you can realtime adjust the microwave power every few microseconds to do all the same things.
My intuition says phased arrays are the more reliable way to do this. Less moving parts and more control. As well, it feels like phased arrays in general are at a really good maturity to be used for this kind of application.
Clearly. The price reflects it (and puts it out of the budget of most markets), but I thing Miele is targeting reliable more than they are targeting low cost.
* Direct microwaves at different parts of the food differently. That way you can cook some stuff lots while leaving other parts cold.
* Detect which parts of the food are cooked - by watching the absorption of microwaves across a broad range of frequencies, you should be able to detect chemical reactions that happen at certain temperatures - eg. ice turning to water, or raw egg becoming cooked egg.
Combine these two things, and you can cook food far 'better' - and get all of your meat to the perfect temperature while overcooking none.