Easily designed and constructed high impedance surfaces

In this paper, we propose a type of new high impedance surface that is extremely easy to design and fabricate. These new surfaces are formed by properly lumped loading a periodic screen on a metallic-backed substrate. This can result in an extremely effective high impedance surface. In particular, we have shown here that capacitive lumped-element loading of a periodic inductive screen is an easily designed and effective surface that would be inexpensive to fabricate. For practical unit cell sizes on the order of a few millimeters, capacitors on the order of a few picofarads are all that is needed to operate this high impedance surface in the commercial wireless communications bands (0.9-6 GHz). Such capacitors are cheap, readily available and will operate nearly to 10 GHz.