Half-spaced substrate integrated spoof surface plasmon polaritons based transmission line

Abstract

In this paper, a new spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) based transmission line (TL) with semi-open structure is proposed, which is implemented on a single-layer substrate with metallized via holes planted on a ground plane. The electromagnetic (EM) power propagates along it in the form of controlled slow surface wave, which is the same with its existing counterparts. The proposed TL can adjust the degree of EM energy confinement, and thus balance its performance in every characteristic, in particular attenuation and interference. As the TL is semi-open (i.e., EM energy distributes in the half space above the ground plane), it is less vulnerable to the nearby interference compared with its former counterparts, which are fully-open structure (i.e., EM energy distributes in the full space). Prototypes working at Ka band are fabricated and measured. Bianco-Parodi (BP) method is used to derive the attenuation of the proposed TL from the measured S-parameters. The proposed structure can be easily scaled for THz applications, which opens the door for future high performance THz components and systems.