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

Ming Zheng Chen; Wankai Tang; Jun Yan Dai; Jun Chen Ke; Lei Zhang; Cheng Zhang; Jin Yang; Lianlin Li; Qiang Cheng; Shi Jin; Tie Jun Cui

doi:10.1093/nsr/nwab134

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

Natl Sci Rev. 2021 Jul 29;9(1):nwab134. doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwab134. eCollection 2022 Jan.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
² National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.

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 positive-intrinsic-negative diodes. By controlling the duty ratios and time delays of the digital coding sequences loaded on a 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 is in good agreement 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, along with other schemes, is 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 application in future mmWave and terahertz-wave wireless communication and radar systems.

Keywords: 256 QAM millimeter-wave wireless communications; accurate and broadband harmonic control; metasurface; time-domain digital coding.