Programmable metasurface, or reconfigurable intelligent surface is one of the most promising strategies to enhance communication and sensing capacities via arrays of reconfigurable meta‐atoms. The functionalities of conventional programmable metasurfaces are usually limited, and active meta‐atoms are connected with steering‐logic board through cables, which makes the whole system inconvenient for installation and stable use. Here an all‐in‐one integrated multifunctional metasurface for various application purpose is proposed. The integration of metasurface and steering‐logic board produces an all‐in‐one system, which makes it compact, low profile, and stable. The novel meta‐atom structure provides all‐in‐one functionalities, including 1) dispersion‐reconfigurable spatial phaser for analogue signal processing, 2) polarization conversion, 3) beam steering and orbital angular momentum generation for high‐speed communication and, 4) near‐field scanning for sensing. The proposed metasurface also has a broadband property, which is operating from 9.5 to 10.5 GHz with 10% relative bandwidth. Such a design integrates functionalities of signal processing, communication, and sensing in a single programmable metasurface, which makes it especially useful for integrated sensing and communication toward next‐generation wireless networks.
Metasurface-based spatial phaser, exhibiting dispersive group delay responses, is able to perform real-time analogue signal processing on the temporal spectrum of spatial electromagnetic waves, e.g., Fourier transformation, pulse chirping, pulse spread, and compression. The functionality of a spatial phaser is closely related to its group delay dispersion slope. For instance, for an up-chirped incident pulse, the positive-slope-dispersion phaser spreads the pulse whereas the negative-slope-dispersion one compresses the pulse. Most reported spatial phasers exhibit fixed dispersion slopes and hence perform single functionality only, which cannot meet the demand of multifunctional systems in communication and sensing applications. In this paper, a new way is proposed to control and tune the dispersion slope of spatial phasers using polarization of incident waves, which is simpler and more efficient than conventional approaches based on tunable circuits. To verify the proposed method, a first-order spatial phaser is designed and experimentally demonstrated within 9.4-10.6 GHz. It is able to generate negative-slope, positive-slope, and zero-slope group delay dispersions, in case of x-, y-, and ±45°-polarized waves. Such a reconfigurable phaser may find wide applications in integrated communication and sensing.
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