Substrate Integrated Plasmonic Waveguide for Microwave Bandpass Filter Applications

In this paper, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate a substrate integrated plasmonic waveguide (SIPW) concept and its application in microwave bandpass filters. This SIPW consists of double arrays of slots etched on the top and bottom metal layers of a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) to support spoof surface plasmon polariton (SSPP) modes with low and high cutoff frequencies. The simulated results show that by tuning the parameters of the SIPW's unit cell, the dispersion characteristics can be engineered at will. Then, we propose a sharp roll-off microwave bandpass filter based on this SIPW. This filter has a passband from 7.5 to 13.0 GHz with high return loss and low insertion loss. Furthermore, to demonstrate the independent tuning of the passband of the filter, we also design two microwave bandpass filters with passbands of 9.2-13.0 GHz and 7.5-10.5 GHz by decreasing the distance between two rows of via holes and increasing the slot length, respectively. Finally, to experimentally validate the filter designs, we fabricate and measure three prototypes and find that the experimental results are in excellent agreement with the simulations. This SIPW concept may have extensive potential applications in the development of various plasmonic integrated functional devices and circuits.