Alexandros Feresidis

Reconfigurable Metasurfaces and Beam-steered Metantennas for Millimetre-wave and Sub-THz Communications

Millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz (THz) frequencies offer new opportunities for future communications, sensing and imaging applications. These include multi-Gigabit/s point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication links as well as recently envisaged mobile short-range communication networks at millimetre-waves (mm-waves). Emerging 6G communication standards promise an extreme evolution of capabilities for future communication systems, such as air interface speeds well over 100Gbps and corresponding backhaul capacity. Clearly, to achieve these targets, new systems and hardware must be developed at new higher millimetre-wave and sub-Terahertz (<1THz) frequency bands with low atmospheric attenuation Highly directive and efficient antennas are required for the aforementioned applications. Moreover, the use beam-steered reconfigurable antennas is also emerging as an important requirement for the successful deployment of the proposed high frequency communication systems. The design and development of beam-reconfigurable antennas at mm-wave and THz frequencies is particularly challenging. This contribution presents recent research in our group in reconfigurable metasurfaces and their use in new metasurface-based beam-steered antennas at mm-wave and sub-THz bands. The designs are based on novel technologies for dynamically tunable metasurfaces under an electric DC bias, leading to beam-steered highly directive antennas as well as intelligent reflecting surfaces with dynamic beam shaping capabilities. The proposed technologies produce significant tuning with relatively low losses, which is one of the great challenges at mm-wave/sub-THz bands. Results will be presented at mm-waves as well as low-THz frequencies around 300GHz.

Alexandros Feresidis is a Professor of Microwave and Terahertz Communications and Head of the Metamaterials Engineering Laboratory in the School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, UK. He leads research on electromagnetic metamaterial structures, antennas, microwave, mm-wave and THz circuits. He is an expert on the analysis and design of artificial periodic metamaterials and metasurfaces, electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structures and frequency selective surfaces (FSS), high-gain and base station antennas, leaky wave antennas, small/compact antennas, computational electromagnetics, microwave/mm-wave/THz circuits and bio-electromagnetic systems. He has authored five book chapters on artificial electromagnetic surfaces and antennas and has published over 180 papers in peer reviewed international journals and conference proceedings. He has presented a number of invited papers and seminars in international conferences and European PhD schools. He has held a Senior Research Fellowship Award from the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering and The Leverhulme Trust. He is a member of the UK EPSRC Peer Review College, he was on the editorial board of IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation journal (2014-2018) and he is currently an Associate Editor in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.