Breaking the Challenge of Signal Integrity Using Time-Domain Spoof Surface Plasmon Polaritons

In modern integrated circuits and wireless communication devices or systems, three key features need to be solved simultaneously to reach higher performance and more compact size: signal integrity, interference suppression, and miniaturization. However, the above-mentioned requests are almost contradictory using the traditional techniques. To overcome this challenge, here we propose time-domain spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) as the carrier of signals. By designing a special plasmonic waveguide constructed by printing two narrow corrugated metallic strips on the top and bottom surfaces of a dielectric substrate with mirror symmetry, we show that spoof SPPs are supported from very low frequency to the cutoff frequency with strong subwavelength effects, which can be converted to the time-domain SPPs. When two such plasmonic waveguides are tightly packed with deep-subwavelength separation, which commonly happens in integrated circuits and wireless communications due to limited space, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that SPP signals on such two plasmonic waveguides have better propagation performance and much less mutual coupling than the conventional signals on two traditional microstrip lines with the same size and separation. Hence the proposed method can achieve significant interference suppression in very compact space, providing a potential solution to break the challenge of signal integrity.