Scalable Metamaterial Integrated Digital Coding Transmitting Bit Array for Concurrent Multistream Direct Antenna Modulation

This letter presents a new type of metamaterial (MTM) integrated digital coding transmitting bit array for wireless communication. The proposed transmitter directly modulates the baseband digital signal on the carrier frequency to each antenna element without using any RF mixers as in conventional homodyne or heterodyne transmitters, thereby simplifying the hardware complexity. Single-tone carrier wave is distributed by an MTM-based power divider and fed to each antenna element of the bit array, the phase of which can be electrically manipulated to realize direct antenna modulation (DAM). Moreover, the code-division multiple access (CDMA) communication method is leveraged to achieve the concurrent multistream data transmission without increasing the hardware intricacy of the system. Experimental verification for concurrently transmitting three different data streams is carried out to demonstrate the validity of the proposed MTM integrated transmitting bit-array architecture.