Controlling Radiation Beams by Low-Profile Planar Antenna Arrays with Coding Elements

Abstract

Beam diversity enables antenna arrays to play important roles in radar, communications, imaging, and next-generation wireless systems. However, achieving flexible control of beams in a low-cost way is still very challenging. Here, we propose low-profile planar antenna arrays with coding elements to control and engineer radiation patterns more freely and flexibly. The proposed planar antenna array consists of binary radiating elements which are characterized by digital codes “0” and “1”. By designing spatial coding patterns of the radiating elements, multifarious functionalities can be well realized, such as beam splitting, beam scanning, and beam deflection. More importantly, coding metasurfaces can be properly arranged around the digital radiating elements to reduce the radar cross section of the antenna, while the radiation performance is well preserved. The low-profile, high-gain, lightweight digital antenna arrays are verified numerically and experimentally in the microwave band. The proposed digital coding planar antenna arrays derive a new paradigm to control the radiation patterns in low-overhead and advanced digital design fashions and offer promising applications in multitasked and intelligent antenna devices and new information systems.

Heterogeneous Amplitude−Phase Metasurface for Distinct Wavefront Manipulation

“…Recently, an increasing demand was devoted to the design of multibeam antenna arrays. [38,54,55] Here, as a demonstration of the above concept, we design an integrated metadevice that is capable of high-directive quad-beam emissions (reflectarray) with uniform intensity under y-polarization state and complete broadband absorption in x-polarization channel using the aforementioned meta-atom. Such a scenario is indeed a fact of gaining invisibility to an antenna, where the scattering under the polarization orthogonal to that of the antenna is typically extremely large.…”

Infrared-controlled programmable metasurface

“…Also, metasurfaces possess merits of low loss and easy integration, due to their thin thicknesses. Accordingly, metasurfaces offer an effective way for controlling wavefront of EM waves powerfully [5] and have boosted the interest toward implementation of multifarious metasurface-inspired devices or systems, such as hologram and imager [6,7], ultrathin cloak [8], vortex beam generator [9], beam steering and multibeam antenna [10,11] and diffuse screen [12]. Despite having vast applications, however, the majority of metasurfaces are static and their func-tions are set in stone after the fabrication, which hinders the applications in tunable and reconfigurable devices, and also restricts miniaturization and integration of systems.…”

Dual‐band reconfigurable metasurface‐assisted Fabry–Pérot antenna with high‐gain radiation and low scattering

“…Generally, to realise high‐quality communications, high gain is an important performance for antennas. Common high‐gain antennas include reflectarray [1–3], transmitarray [4, 5] and microstrip antenna array [6, 7], but they are typically limited to either large bulk or complex feed networks, thus often resulting in high cost or poor efficiency. Fabry–Pérot (F–P) cavity antenna, proposed by G.V.…”