A Wideband Amplifying Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface
Li Jie Wu, Kai Lou, Junchen Ke, Jing Cheng Liang, Zhangjie Luo, Jun Yan Dai, Qiang Cheng, Tie Jun Cui
Abstract
We present a C-band amplifying reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS) integrated with power amplifier (PA) to enhance the reflected electromagnetic (EM) signals. An aperture-coupled patch element with two orthogonal hourglass-shaped slots is elaborately constructed to ensure a broad operation bandwidth. A power combining and dividing network is also introduced to combine the 2 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times2$ </tex-math></inline-formula> elements into a subarray to reduce the number of PAs and the system cost. The simulation results indicate that the achieved gain of ARIS is 7.7–12.2 dB from 5.0 to 6.0 GHz. A prototype of the proposed ARIS is designed, fabricated, and experimentally verified. The measured results agree well with the simulation. The proposed ARIS is promising for applications in future wireless communication systems for signal enhancement and coverage extension.