Mass-manufactured beam-steering metasurfaces for high-speed full-duplex optical wireless broadcasting communications.

Beam-steering devices, which are at the heart of optical wireless broadcasting communication links, play an important role in data allocation and exchange. An ideal beam-steering device features large steering angles, arbitrary channel numbers, reconfigurability, and ultra-compactness. However, these criteria have been achieved only partially with conventional beam-steering devices based on waveguides, micro-electrical mechanical systems, spatial light modulators, and gratings, which would substantially limit the application of optical wireless broadcasting communication techniques. In this study, we designed and experimentally demonstrated an ultra-compact full-duplex meta-broadcasting communication system, which exhibits beam steering angles up to ±40°, 14 broadcasting channels with capacity for downstream and upstream links up to 100 and 10 Gbps for each user channel, three operating modes for flexible signal switching, and meta-device dimensions as small as 2 mm × 2 mm. In particular, the beam-steering meta-devices are mass-manufactured by a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor processing platform, which shows their potential for large-scale commercial applications. The demonstrated meta-broadcasting communication system merges optical wireless broadcasting communications and metasurfaces, which reduces the complexity of beam-steering devices while significantly increasing their performance, opening up a new avenue for high-quality optical wireless broadcasting communications. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.