Recently, an innovative technology of modified structures known as metasurfaces has emerged targeting numerous applications specially in the field of beam steering. These structures are compact, lightweight, and are capable of offering highly tunable solutions for electromagnetic wave manipulation. The primary approaches to achieve beam steering using metasurfaces can be divided into passive designs that utilize fixed phase gradients, tunable systems consisting of varactors or liquid crystals, and active methods incorporating electronic elements or optical control for dynamic reconfiguration. Metasurfaces can be developed and designed using a variety of different techniques and methods. Printed circuit board (PCB) metasurfaces are significant due to cost effective fabrication, mechanical stability and ease of integration with other electronic components. Dielectric based metasurfaces offer low loss operation as well as high efficiency along with high phase control capability. 3D‐printed metasurfaces are notable due to their ability to construct complex, detailed, and customizable geometries with swift prototyping, enabling low cost and scalable fabrication of advanced electromagnetic structures for numerous applications. Another noteworthy class of metasurfaces is constituted by fluid based and advanced material based metasurfaces. Such metasurfaces can manipulate the electromagnetic waves using the concepts of reconfigurability and adaptability. This review explores different metasurface design technologies in detail, with emphasis on the advantages, limitations as well as future research directions targeting beam steam steering applications, offered by these techniques.
Rasool et al. (Thu,) studied this question.