Mass‐Manufactured Beam‐Steering Metasurfaces for High‐Speed Full‐Duplex Optical Wireless‐Broadcasting Communications

TLDR

Beam‑steering devices are essential for optical wireless‑broadcasting links, yet conventional technologies only partially meet the desired large angles, many channels, reconfigurability, and ultracompactness, limiting their practical use. This work designs and experimentally demonstrates an ultracompact full‑duplex metabroadcasting system capable of ±40° steering, 14 bidirectional channels at up to 100 Gbps downstream and 10 Gbps upstream per user, and three flexible switching modes. The beam‑steering metadevices are fabricated on a CMOS platform, enabling mass production and large‑scale commercial deployment. The system merges optical wireless‑broadcasting with metasurfaces, reducing device complexity while markedly improving performance and opening a new path for high‑quality optical wireless‑broadcasting communications.

Abstract

Beam-steering devices, which are at the heart of optical wireless-broadcasting communication links, play an important role in data allocation and exchange. An ideal beam-steering device features large steering angles, arbitrary channel numbers, reconfigurability, and ultracompactness. However, these criteria have been achieved only partially with conventional beam-steering devices based on waveguides, micro-electricalmechanical systems, spatial light modulators, and gratings, which will substantially limit the application of optical wireless-broadcasting communication techniques. In this study, an ultracompact full-duplex metabroadcasting communication system is designed and experimentally demonstrated, which exhibits beam steering angles up to ±40°, 14 broadcasting channels with capacity for downstream and upstream links up to 100 and 10 Gbps for each user channel, three operating modes for flexible signal switching, and metadevice dimensions as small as 2 mm × 2 mm. In particular, the beam-steering metadevices are mass-manufactured by a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processing platform, which shows their potential for large-scale commercial applications. The demonstrated metabroadcasting communication system merges optical wireless-broadcasting communications and metasurfaces, which reduces the complexity of beam-steering devices while significantly increasing their performance, opening up a new avenue for high-quality optical wireless-broadcasting communications.