Compact wideband filter with wide stopband using transition-free spoof surface plasmon polaritons

In this article, a newly spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) is proposed and used to design a compact wideband bandpass filter (BPF). Different from the traditional SSPP unit cell with one-shaped structure, the unit cell of the proposed SSPPs consists of an H-shaped slotline and a bilateral T-shaped slotline. Benefiting from the hybrid structure, no transition portion is needed for impedance matching in the design of the microwave filter, which highly reduces the horizontal size of the SSPPs-based filter. The transition structure of microstrip to slotline provides a capacitance with a highpass frequency response, which enables the realization of a passband by cooperating with the natural lowpass property of SSPPs. Also, the upper and lower cutoff frequencies of the proposed filter can be adjusted independently by the key parameters. Besides, a wide upper stopband can be obtained by properly designing the SSPPs unit cell and the microstrip to slotline structure. Finally, a well-designed BPF operated at 1.3-6.2 GHz and its upper stopband rejection reaching 20 GHz is fabricated and measured. The test results are in good agreement with the simulations, which verifies the feasibility of the proposed structure and design method.