TERAHERTZ INTEGRATED CIRCUITS USING SPOOF SURFACE PLASMON POLARITONS

Abstract

There is a rapid increase in the demand of the wireless applications due to the ubiquitous utilization of the electronic devices has led an exponential increase in the data transfer rate. Wireless applications such as multimedia sharing, cloud computing, big-data applications along with the Internet of things (IoT) requires high performance interconnects to achieve high data rate communication. As microwave frequency spectrum has already become congested, the use of Terahertz bands can offer multi gigabit per second (Gb/s) data transfer rate to fulfill the demand of the present and future wireless communication. As wireless communication standards occupy the different frequency bands, it becomes essential to employ the multi-band and/or wideband transceiver architecture to utilize the single hardware for distinct communication standards with multiple functionalities. Moreover, to utilize the same hardware for future wireless applications, reconfigurable features also need to be incorporated in the transceiver architecture to add one more degree of freedom. In order to design the future generation wireless communication systems, different passive and active components with low–loss and low–cost along with the energy efficient architecture need to be developed. Transmission line is one of the basic building blocks of the wireless communication systems, which is used to realize various high frequency components and also, provide a route to the electromagnetic signal to flow from one component to other in the hardware. Among the different available technologies, planar technology is mainly preferred to realize different high frequency components because it offers many advantages such as low–cost, low– profile, ease of fabrication and integration with the different active components. However, as the frequency of operation increases to the sub-millimeter and THz range, the conventional planar technologies suffer from interference, crosstalk, and mutual coupling, which is not desirable. Since the transmission line performance translates the overall circuit performance; there is a need to reduce the cross-talks and mutual coupling problem between neighboring planar transmission lines to develop the low–loss components and systems.