Experimental study of a modified silicon-based CRLH cell for enhanced reconfigurability

Up to now there has been an intense research on metamaterials based on Composite Right/Left Handed (CRLH) approach and several applications based on this approach have been developed. Most of the published CRLH cells are composed of an interdigital-capacitor and a stub-inductor implemented on microstrip technology. In previous work, the design and simulation results of a modified CRLH unit cell endowed of a new stub-capacitor in order to facilitate the reconfigurability have been presented. In this paper, the fabricated structures based on silicon technology will be experimentally investigated. The equivalent circuit of the basic and the modified CRLH structures are extracted in order to give the dispersion diagrams. The experimental study demonstrates that the stub added to the design could help to avoid the shunt capacitance parasitic by controlling its value. This allows to tune the characteristic frequencies of the Left Handed (LH) and the Right Handed (RH) bands.