A modified composite right/left‐handed unit cell for multiband applications

Abstract

A new planar 3‐band composite right/left‐handed (CRLH) unit cell is presented using an interdigital capacitor, two grounded stubs and etching a defected ground structure on the ground plane. A 3‐band filter is designed using this CRLH unit cell. In addition, with nonlinear dispersion relation of the 3‐band unit cell, it can be used as a hexa‐band quarter wave impedance transformer. Using this functionality, a planar hexa‐band power splitter is designed with relatively good performance. A fabricated prototype of the power divider is measured and the experimental results indicate that the power divider achieved better than 10 dB of return loss and the insertion loss is better than 6 dB over six‐frequency bands.