Zheng Dongze, Wu Geng-Bo, Jiang Zhi Hao, Hong Wei, Chan Chi Hou, Wu Ke
School of Information Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
Department of Electrical Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Terahertz and Millimeter Waves, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China.
Fundam Res. 2024 Nov 12;5(2):556-570. doi: 10.1016/j.fmre.2024.10.003. eCollection 2025 Mar.
Due to the exponentially growing global mobile data of wireless communications evolving from 5 G to 6 G in recent years, research activities of leveraging terahertz (THz) waves to obtain larger channel capacities have shown an ever-increasing pace and reached an unprecedented height than before. Historically, the past few decades have already witnessed much progress in THz generation and detection technologies, which have been recognized for a long time as the bottleneck preventing the THz waves from being tamed by human beings. However, the importance of developing advanced components such as antennas, transmission lines, filters, power amplimers, etc., which constitute the basic building blocks of a THz wireless system, should not be overlooked for the sake of exploiting the THz spectra for future advanced wireless communications, sensing and imaging applications. While producing a scannable highly-directive antenna beam proves to be indispensable in the period of microwaves, the significance of such functionality is more critical in the THz era, considering that THz waves have more intractable challenges such as the severity of free-space propagation losses, the susceptibility to atmospheric environments, and the unavailability of efficient signal sources. This article is structured under this background, which is dedicated to reviewing several enabling beam-scanning antenna concepts, structures, and architectures that have been developed for THz wireless systems. Specifically, we divide these THz beam-scanning solutions into four basic groups based on different mechanisms, i.e., mechanical motion, phased array, frequency beam-scanning, and reconfigurable metasurfaces.
近年来，随着全球无线通信移动数据呈指数级增长，从5G向6G演进，利用太赫兹（THz）波获取更大信道容量的研究活动日益活跃，达到了前所未有的高度。从历史上看，过去几十年太赫兹产生和检测技术已经取得了很大进展，长期以来这些技术一直被认为是阻碍人类驾驭太赫兹波的瓶颈。然而，为了将太赫兹频谱用于未来先进的无线通信、传感和成像应用，开发诸如天线、传输线、滤波器、功率放大器等构成太赫兹无线系统基本组件的先进部件的重要性不可忽视。虽然在微波时代，产生可扫描的高定向天线波束被证明是必不可少的，但考虑到太赫兹波面临更多棘手的挑战，如自由空间传播损耗严重、对大气环境敏感以及缺乏高效信号源等，这种功能在太赫兹时代更为关键。本文正是在这一背景下展开，致力于综述为太赫兹无线系统开发的几种实现波束扫描的天线概念、结构和架构。具体而言，我们根据不同机制将这些太赫兹波束扫描解决方案分为四个基本组，即机械运动、相控阵、频率波束扫描和可重构超表面。
