Real-Time Electromagnetic Signal Processing: Principles and Illustrations

Abstract

Real-time electromagnetic signal processing has recently appeared as a novel signalprocessing paradigm to manipulate and control electromagnetic signals in real time directly in the analog domain. This has led to attractive alternatives to conventional digital techniques, which typically suffer from poor performances and high cost at microwave and millimeter wave frequencies. This novel paradigm is based on dispersion-engineered electromagnetic structures, and in this review chapter, two types of structures are presented and discussed in details: phasers and metasurfaces. While phasers are typically group delay engineered to manipulate and rearrange spectral components in the time domain, metasurfaces enhances these functionalities by providing spatial processing in addition to temporal processing. Two kinds of phasers are presented here: static and dynamic all-pass C-section phasers, and all-dielectric metasurface-based spatial phasers. Finally, two applications illustrating real-time signal processing are discussed: 2D beam scanning leaky-wave antenna for high-resolution spectrum analysis and a dispersion code multiple access (DCMA) system.