ASIC-Enabled Programmable Metasurfaces—Part 2: Performance and Synthesis

A multifunctional and reconfigurable programmable metasurface (PMSF) enabled by an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that targets smart wireless environment applications is presented in this work. In the accompanying paper, in Part 1, the PMSF design experimentally demonstrated the ability to control independently the magnitude and phase of the reflection coefficients for both orthogonal polarizations. Here, this ability is exploited to demonstrate programmable electromagnetic wavefront manipulation. A fast and accurate synthesis method using a 2-D single-iteration discrete Fourier transform (DFT) for producing multiple pencil beams, each with different polarizations, is presented. Each pencil beam can have a linear, right-handed circular polarization, left-handed circular polarization, or even elliptical polarization. The synthesis method is ideal for wireless reconfigurable environments enabled by the PMSF, where the number of unit cells is very large. The PMSF aims to be a single component, installed not only in the surrounding walls to reconfigure the wireless environment, but also at the transmitting antennas. The design is experimentally verified by producing a mixture of linearly polarized and circularly polarized wavefronts, and also single, dual, and simultaneous orbital angular momentum (OAM) pencil beams are experimentally shown.