Millimeter-wave and Terahertz Real-Time and Space Processing based on Metamaterial Technology

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Today's exploding demand for faster, more reliable, and ubiquitous radio systems in communications, instrumentation, radar, imaging and sensors poses unprecedented challenges in microwave (mw), millimeter-wave (mmw) and terahertz (THz) engineering. Recently, the predominant trend has been to place increasing emphasis on digital signal processing (DSP). However, while offering device compactness and processing flexibility, DSP suffers from intrinsic drawbacks, such as limited speed, high-cost analog-digital conversion, high power consumption, and poor performance at high frequencies, leading to serious technological bottlenecks. For instance, in wireless communications, a 1,000-fold increase in data capacity demand over the 5 next years has been predicted, and it is widely recognized by industrial experts that current technologies will be largely insufficient to meet such requirements! Therefore, novel paradigms and disruptive technological solutions are urgently needed.***The proposed research program proposes a radically different approach to address the aforementioned challenges by leveraging metamaterial technology. Inspired from ultrafast optics, it will develop mmw and THz real-time analog signal processing, consisting in manipulating high-frequency signals in their pristine analog form and in real time to realize specific processing operations, as an alternative to DSP-based processing. This is essentially temporal dispersion engineering, where linear components such as metamaterial-based "phasers" (term borrowed from acoustics) and nonlinear components called "companders" (portmanteau for compressors and expandors) will be elaborated to control the phase and group delay of mww/THz systems in unprecedented fashions. ***As electromagnetic waves propagate both in time and space, spatial dispersion engineering appears to be a natural processing complement to its temporal counterpart. The proposed program will thus develop, this time inspired from optical analog signal processing, novel types of mmw and THz antennas and surfennas (metasurfaces operated in the monochromatic regime), such as for instance vortex wave antennas and generalized refraction surfennas. Finally, the program will investigate devices operating simultaneously as temporal and spatial processors, namely "phasennas," "compandenas" and "surfphasennas."***The proposed time/space/spacetime processors will lead to a great diversity of applications, such as real-time/space Fourier transformers and spectrogram analyzers, real-time convolvers/correlators, nonreciprocal devices, dispersion encoders, vortex multiplexers, maxwellian spatial systems, and space-time cloaks, with application areas as various as communications, wireless energy transfer, sensing/imaging, instrumentation, security/defense, biomedicine, nanoelectromagnetics and astronomy.**