arXiv:2611.05999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a wave-domain linear receiver for wideband MIMO-OFDM, where the main high-dimensional linear processing conventionally performed after sampling is physically shifted to propagation through stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs). The proposed receiver transforms receive-port waveforms into OFDM-domain symbols through three cascaded SIM-enabled functional sections. The first section, SIM_1, performs channel-memory processing and channel shortening in an energy-concentration sense, suppressing the out-of-cyclic-prefix (CP) effective tail before OFDM analysis. SIM_2 realizes CP removal and discrete Fourier transform (DFT) analysis as cyclic-windowed OFDM matched filtering by exploiting useful-window memory and analytical Fourier phase coding. SIM_3 implements residual virtual-subcarrier MIMO linear detection, completing the wave-domain linear receive chain up to symbol slicing. Synchronization, control, slicing, and decoding remain digital, while the dominant linear receive operations are moved to the wave domain. A staged configuration framework is developed: the numerology-dependent OFDM analyzer is compiled offline, whereas the channel-dependent memory processor and detector are configured over the coherence time using architecture-aware learning-assisted control. Numerical results validate both functional replacement and link performance, confirming nearly lossless replacement under CP-sufficient MIMO-OFDM conditions, with robustness to residual timing offsets and effective channel-delay-profile perturbations. Substantial gains under CP-insufficient channels are also demonstrated by suppressing out-of-CP leakage before OFDM analysis.