Innovative design of scanning antennas using electronically reconfigurable metasurfaces

Metasurfaces (MTS´s) can be considered nowadays a promising way for designing a large class of electromagnetic devices, such as antennas, beamsplitters or planar lenses. They consist of a dense arrangement of sub-wavelength elements, organized in such a way that unusual electromagnetic properties can be achieved. Among of the main advantages of MTS´s are their low cost, low profile and realization simplicity; in fact, PCB technology can be profitably used to fabricate MTS´s consisting of elements printed on a grounded dielectric slab.