Fine control of filter performance based on composite right/left‐handed metamaterial technology

Composite right/left‐handed (CRLH) metamaterial unit cell whose ground‐plane is defected with a rectangular dielectric slot is used to develop a single and multi‐pole pole bandpass filter. The unit cell comprises of serially connected interdigital capacitors whose junction is connected to a short‐circuited inductive stub. By defecting the ground‐plane of the unit cell's structure with a dielectric slot, which is located immediately below the unit cell, enables substantial tuning of the filter's center frequency in the order of 26.5%. This is achieved with minimal effect on the unit cell's insertion and return‐loss performance including its selectivity. The filters were fabricated on conventional dielectric substrate and their performance measured to verify the design methodology. The proposed technique eases the trade‐off constraints and makes possible the realization of challenging filter specifications constituted from CRLH unit cells using distributed transmission‐lines. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:39–45, 2014.