Controlling Radiation Beams by Low-Profile Planar Antenna Arrays with Coding Elements

Beam diversity enables antenna arrays to play important roles in radar, communications, imaging, and next-generation wireless systems. However, achieving flexible control of beams in a low-cost way is still very challenging. Here, we propose low-profile planar antenna arrays with coding elements to control and engineer radiation patterns more freely and flexibly. The proposed planar antenna array consists of binary radiating elements which are characterized by digital codes "0" and "1". By designing spatial coding patterns of the radiating elements, multifarious functionalities can be well realized, such as beam splitting, beam scanning, and beam deflection. More importantly, coding metasurfaces can be properly arranged around the digital radiating elements to reduce the radar cross section of the antenna, while the radiation performance is well preserved. The low-profile, high-gain, lightweight digital antenna arrays are verified numerically and experimentally in the microwave band. The proposed digital coding planar antenna arrays derive a new paradigm to control the radiation patterns in low-overhead and advanced digital design fashions and offer promising applications in multitasked and intelligent antenna devices and new information systems.