Principal Investigator: Professor Chen Zhi Ning, ECE
Co-Principal Investigator: Liu Peiqin (Dr), ECE

Employing ultra-large-scale (ULS) intelligent surfaces is a trend for controlling electromagnetic (EM) waves in wireless systems such as improving the coverage, robustness, and data rate of future wireless systems. The surfaces usually comprise an array of unit cells (elements or pixels). The functionality and performance of the surfaces can be intelligently adjusted or optimized to respond to the variation of environments or tasks. The surfaces include but not limited to metasurfaces, passive scattering surfaces, multiple radiator arrays, and so on. All the surfaces can be reconfigurable, tunable, and adaptable.

This project aims to explore the characterization, optimization and design methodology of new types of ULS intelligent surfaces for EM wave control for future wireless systems. 1) We are going to propose new types of unit cells and configurations for compact, high-performance and reconfigurable ULS surfaces. An ultra-large-scale and ultra-dense intelligent surface will comprise thousands of unit cells or even more with huge volume. 2) We are going to apply new mathematical modeling methods such as deep learning (DL) in the modeling, characterization and optimization of EM waves for human-intelligent extendable design, automatic design, automatic diagnosis and self-healing, computing resources and time saving design and optimization of ULS surfaces.

The project is to focus on research into the fundamental scientific and engineering challenges for future wireless communication, detection, and imaging systems.