Spoof Surface Plasmon Polariton Delay Lines for Terahertz Phase Shifters

The terahertz gap attracted interest of researchers with its captivating properties such as its potential for ultrawideband communication and high-resolution imaging applications, which require robust and efficient terahertz components and circuits. Terahertz spoof surface plasmon polaritons are perfect alternatives to implement terahertz integrated circuits. We present the first-time demonstration of the terahertz spoof surface plasmon polariton delay lines for terahertz phase shifters, which present an unprecedented insertion phase versus loss performance. The electrical lengths of the proposed delay lines are tuned just by changing the corrugation depths, which allows the designer to keep the physical length of the delay lines constant. In order to verify the proposed idea, four different delay lines having the same length of 1052.5 μm are designed, where the electrical lengths of the delay lines are selected to represent the four different phase states of a 2-bit phase shifter. The measurement results of the fabricated terahertz delay lines show almost perfect phase accuracy and very good agreement with the simulations, having an ultra-low average phase error of 0.6%, and average insertion and return losses of −2.3 and −18 dB, respectively. These measurements result in, to the best of our knowledge, a record-high figure-of-merit of 90°/dB compared to all other kinds of planar waveguides at 0.3 THz. The proposed delay lines emerge as a very high-performance and promising candidate for all the waveguide-based components that are crucial for the terahertz integrated circuits.