PubCard - Accurate and broadband manipulations of harmonic amplitudes and phases to reach 256QAM millimeter-wave wireless communications by time-domain digital coding metasurface

(Peer-Reviewed) Accurate and broadband manipulations of harmonic amplitudes and phases to reach 256QAM millimeter-wave wireless communications by time-domain digital coding metasurface

Ming Zheng Chen 陈明正 ¹ ² ⁶, Wankai Tang 唐万恺 ³ ⁶, Jun Yan Dai 戴俊彦 ¹ ² ⁴, Jun Chen Ke ¹ ², Lei Zhang ¹ ² ⁶, Cheng Zhang ¹, Jin Yang ¹ ² ⁶, Lianlin Li ⁵ ⁶, Qiang Cheng 程强 ¹ ² ⁶, Shi Jin 金石 ¹ ³ ⁶, Tie Jun Cui 傅晓建 ¹ ² ⁶

¹ Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China; 东南大学电磁空间科学与技术研究院
² State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China; 东南大学毫米波国家重点实验室
³ National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China; 东南大学移动通信国家重点实验室
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Terahertz and Millimeter Waves, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; 香港城市大学太赫兹及毫米波国家重点实验室
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; 北京大学电子学系区域光纤通信网与新型光通信系统国家重点实验室
⁶ Center of Intelligent Metamaterials, Pazhou Laboratory, Guangzhou 510330, China 广州琶洲实验室智能超材料研究中心

National Science Review, 2021-07-29

https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwab134

https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwab134/6330461

Abstract

We propose a theoretical mechanism and new coding strategy to realize extremely accurate manipulations of nonlinear electromagnetic harmonics in ultrawide frequency band based on a time-domain digital coding metasurface (TDCM). Using the proposed mechanism and coding strategy, we design and fabricate a millimeter-wave (mmWave) TDCM, which is composed of reprogrammable meta-atoms embedded with PIN diodes.

By controlling the duty ratios and time delays of the digital coding sequences loaded on TDCM, experimental results show that both amplitudes and phases of different harmonics can be engineered at will simultaneously and precisely in broad frequency band from 22 to 33 GHz, even when the coding states are imperfect, which have good agreements with theoretical calculations.

Based on the fabricated high-performance TDCM, we further propose and experimentally realize a large-capacity mmWave wireless communication system, where 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) along with other schemes are demonstrated. The new wireless communication system has a much simpler architecture than the currently used mmWave wireless systems, and hence can significantly reduce the hardware cost.

We believe that the proposed method and system architecture can find vast applications in the future mmWave and terahertz-wave (THzWave) wireless communication and radar systems.