The powerful capability of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in tailoring electromagnetic waves and fields has put them under the spotlight in wireless communications. However, the current designs are criticized due to their poor frequency selectivity, which hinders their applications in real-world scenarios where the spectrum is becoming increasingly congested. Here we propose a filtering RIS to feature sharp frequency-selecting and 2-bit phase-shifting properties. It permits the signals in a narrow bandwidth to transmit but rejects the out-of-band ones; meanwhile, the phase of the transmitted signals can be digitally controlled, enabling flexible manipulations of signal propagations. A prototype is designed, fabricated, and measured, and its high quality factor and phase-shifting characteristics are validated by scattering parameters and beam-steering phenomena. Further, we conduct a wireless communication experiment to illustrate the intriguing functions of the RIS. The filtering behavior enables the RIS to perform wireless signal manipulations with anti-interference ability, thus showing big potential to advance the development of next-generation wireless communications.

An electrically tunable metasurface that absorbs continuous electromagnetic (EM) surface waves is proposed by taking advantage of varactor diodes embedded in the surface. On the one hand, the varactors perform as the main dissipating components due to their parasitic series resistance; on the other hand, they function as the tuning elements because the dissipation is highly dependent on their capacitance. Therefore, the absorption of the surface can be tuned by the direct current biasing voltage across the varactors, which is validated numerically and experimentally in this letter. This absorbing mechanism of the surface differs from prior surface-wave absorbers and can lead to greater flexibility for absorbing metasurfaces. In this work, a power-dependent absorbing performance is achieved by loading microwave power sensors. If incorporated with other types of sensors, the absorption could potentially be controlled by corresponding physical variables such as light, pressure, or temperature, thus giving rise to various absorbing applications in a complex EM environment.

Impedance surfaces are artificially designed periodic structures that support surface waves. This paper presents a novel concept of a nonlinear impedance surface, whose impedance increases with the surface wave power. The proposed surface consists of a lattice of modified slotted mushroom-like cells loaded with varactor diodes and lumped circuits. The circuits are designed to sense the incoming surface wave power and feed back the signal to control the bias of the varactors, which eventually tunes the surface impedance. Such proposed power-dependent impedance surface has been demonstrated by a prototype consisting of 4 × 10 cells. It is observed from the experiments that as the power varies from 16 to 27 dBm, the surface exhibits a surface impedance range as much as j385 to j710 Ω. This characteristic enables the surface to be potentially useful in self-trapping surface-wave waveguide, power-dependent beam-steering antenna reflector, and other nonlinear applications.