Left-handed metamaterial coplanar waveguide components and circuits in GaAs MMIC technology

A set of novel left-handed LH) basic block monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) components (transmission line, open and short stubs) are presented with applications to the RF/microwave filter and power divider. These new open and short LH MMIC resonators have compact sizes of 0.11 and 0.22 mm2, respectively. The prototypes of an LH bandpass filter and LH power divider constructed from these basic components have been designed, fabricated, and characterized. The LH filter consisting of an LH transmission line and four LH open resonators exhibits transmission zeros at both sides of the passband from 1.02 to 1.42 GHz with 33.3% fractional bandwidth. The LH power divider including two LH branches shows equal power split from 2.8 to 3.72 GHz. The filter and power divider benefit from the miniaturized LH MMIC components and have compact sizes of 2.85 and 2.3 mm2, respectively. Loss issues of these LH structures and, more importantly, the effect of skin depth at low frequency are investigated. Full-wave simulations for conductor thicknesses of 0.2, 1.4, and 5 μm are presented for the proposed LH MMIC components and circuits. There is a good agreement between the full-wave simulations, equivalent-circuit model, and measurement results with 1.4-μm metal thickness demonstrating the effectiveness of the models. © 2007 IEEE.