Scalability Analysis of Programmable Metasurfaces for Beam Steering

IEEE Access

Eduard Alarcon¹  Anna C. Tasolamprou¹  Albert Cabellos-Aparicio²  Maria Kafesaki²  Nikolaos V. Kantartzis²  Christos Liaskos²  Alexandros Pitilakis³  Hamidreza Taghvaee³  Odysseas Tsilipakos⁴  Sergi Abadal⁴ 

[1] Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece;Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Heraklion, Greece;NaNoNetworking Center in Catalonia (N3Cat), Universitat Polit&x00E8;cnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;

关键词: Beam steering;    metamaterials;    reconfigurable architectures;    scalability;   

DOI  :  10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3000424

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Programmable metasurfaces have garnered significant attention as they confer unprecedented control over the electromagnetic (EM) response of any surface. Such feature has given rise to novel design paradigms such as Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDM) and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) with multiple groundbreaking applications. However, the development of programmable metasurfaces tailored to the particularities of a potentially large application pool becomes a daunting task because the design space becomes remarkably large. This paper aims to ease the design process by proposing a methodology that employs a semi-analytical formulation to model the response of a metasurface and, then, derives performance scaling trends as functions of a representative set of design and application-specific variables. Although the methodology is amenable to any EM functionality, this paper explores its use for the case of beam steering at 26 GHz for 5G applications. Conventional beam steering metrics are evaluated as functions of the unit cell size, number of unit cell states, and metasurface size for different incidence and reflection angles. It is shown that metasurfaces $5\lambda \times 5 \lambda $ or larger with unit cells of $\lambda /3$ and four unit cell states ensure good performance overall. Further, it is demonstrated that performance degrades significantly for angles larger than $\theta > 60^{o}$ and that, to combat this, extra effort is needed in the development of the unit cell. These performance trends, when combined with power and cost models, will pave the way to optimal metasurface dimensioning.

【 授权许可】

Unknown