A Programmable Terahertz Metasurface With Circuit-Coupled Meta-Elements in Silicon Chips: Creating Low-Cost, Large-Scale, Reconfigurable Terahertz Metasurfaces

As we step into a world of ubiquitous connectivity, a spectral regime-spanning, 30-300+-GHz resource is opening up that will serve as the fabric for wireless sensing and communication coexistence, allowing high-resolution sensing (imaging, gesture recognition, and localization) and enabling a network of unmanned and autonomous systems to understand and interact with our environment. This pushes the need for low-profile, low-cost, low-power, high-performance, secure, multifunctional electromagnetic (EM) platforms that can enable such wireless systems. In this article, we present a new circuit-coupled active meta-element design to demonstrate reconfigurable, multifunctional terahertz (THz) holographic metasurfaces with tiled silicon chips. Each such chip consists of a 12,× 12 array of meta-elements that are individually addressable and reconfigurable at gigahertz (GHz) speed.