We present a novel, power and hardware efficient, antenna system leveraging the eigenmodes of the over-the-air propagation matrix from an active multi-antenna feeder (AMAF) to a large reflective intelligent surface (RIS), both configured as standard linear arrays and placed in the near field of each other. We demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed architecture by showing that it is capable of generating radiation patterns for multiple applications such as very narrow beams with low side lobes for space-division multiple access communications, wide-angle beams for short range automotive sensing and sectorial beaconing, and monopulse-like patterns for radar angular tracking. A key parameter in our design is the AMAF-RIS distance which must be optimized and it is generally much less than the Rayleigh distance. For a given AMAF aperture, the optimal AMAF-RIS distance increases as a function of the RIS size. The AMAF-RIS loss is compensated almost exactly by the larger aperture gain of the RIS leading to almost constant RIS gain with increasing RIS sizes. This allows to choose different beam angular selectivities with the same center beam gain. Active RF amplification is done at the AMAF only, thus resulting in a much higher power efficiency and much lower hardware complexity than conventional phased arrays with same beamforming performance.

Accepted for the IEEE ICC 2023, Rome