Reprogrammable Nonlinear Transmission Controls Using an Information Metasurface

Abstract Nonlinearity manipulation based on electromagnetic (EM) metasurfaces has always been a hot topic, which is an important part of communication and radar systems. However, most of the existing transmission metasurfaces are mainly focused on linear processing on the incident EM waves. In this article, a reprogrammable nonlinear transmission metasurface is proposed for spatial waves using active power amplifiers. An ultrathin and compact metasurface is designed, fabricated, and measured, to achieve reprogrammable functions on the nonlinear transmissions. For EM incidence, the metasurface can not only amplify the magnification of small signals, but also control high‐energy signals nonlinearly, whose magnification is determined by different bias voltages. The simulation and experimental results show good consistency, which verifies the feasibility of the proposed method. This work can find potential applications in signal gain compression and construction of nonlinear units of diffractive deep neural networks.