Digital phase shifters have been applied in traditional phased array antennas to realize beam steering. However, the phase shifter deals with the phase of the induced current; hence, it has to be in the path of each element of the antenna array, making the phased array antennas very expensive. Metamaterials and/or metasurfaces enable the direct modulation of electromagnetic waves by designing subwavelength structures, which opens a new way to control the beam scanning. Here, we present a direct digital mechanism to control the scattered electromagnetic waves using coding metasurface, in which each unit cell loads a pin diode to produce binary coding states of “1” and “0”. Through data lines, the instant communications are established between the coding metasurface and the internal memory of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Thus, we realize the digital modulation of electromagnetic waves, from which we present the field-programmable reflective antenna with good measurement performance. The proposed mechanism and functional device have great application potential in new-concept radar and communication systems.
Coding metasurfaces are aimed at representing digital information of the metasurface, usually by programing digital unit cells to control electromagnetic waves. However, some information sequences cannot be recognized by the receiver, because of nonorthogonality of the usual phase codes. Here, new coding method is proposed to encode information with orthogonal parameters in the emitting beam, which reduces information loss in the system. A vector beam modulator is proposed by combining orthogonal polarizations and orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes. A normal incident wave can be modulated by OAM‐mode bit and polarization bit, which are regarded as specific information by the receiver. A polarization converter is used to realize the polarization selection (polarization bit) and phase control, independently. The phase patterns on the coding metasurfaces can be programed to realize the designed OAM modes (OAM bits) in the microwave frequency. Three schemes are presented to emit multiple OAM modes in dual polarizations, one of which is manufactured and measured for near and far fields. The simulations and experiments are in outstanding agreement, verifying the excellent performance of the proposed schemes. This work has great potential in communication applications of coding metasurfaces.
A digital-coding programmable metasurface (DCPM) is a type of functional system that is composed of subwavelength-scale digital coding elements with opposite phase responses. By configuring the digital coding elements, a DCPM can construct dynamic near-field image patterns in which the intensity of each pixel of the image can be dynamically and independently modulated. Thus, a DCPM can perform both spatial and temporal modulations. Here, this advantage is used to realize multichannel direct transmissions of near-field information. Three points are selected in the near-field region to form three independent channels. By applying various digital phase codes on the DCPM, independent binary digital symbols defined by amplitude codes (namely, weak and strong amplitudes) are transmitted through the three channels. The measured near-field distributions and temporal transmissions of the system agree with numerical calculations. Compared with the conventional multichannel transmission, the proposed mechanism achieves simultaneous spatial and temporal modulations by treating DCPM as an energy radiator and information modulator, thereby enduing DCPM with high potential in near-field information processing and communications.
Recently, scalar (or isotropic) and vector (or uniaxially anisotropic) metasurfaces have been investigated intensively to control the propagations and/or polarizations of reflected, transmitted, and radiated electromagnetic waves. Here, an inhomogeneous tensor (or fully anisotropic) metasurface is proposed to manipulate two independent beams with independent polarizations. Direct holographic method is employed to modulate tensor surface impedance of a metasurface, which is designed and realized using anisotropic metamaterial particles. Both simulations and measurements prove the capabilities of the proposed tensor metasurface in controlling the directions of dual beams and their polarizations independently. The presented structure has very low profile, indicating potential applications in radar detections, satellite, and wireless communications.
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