In modern integrated circuits and wireless communication devices or systems, three key features need to be solved simultaneously to reach higher performance and more compact size: signal integrity, interference suppression, and miniaturization. However, the above-mentioned requests are almost contradictory using the traditional techniques. To overcome this challenge, here we propose time-domain spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) as the carrier of signals. By designing a special plasmonic waveguide constructed by printing two narrow corrugated metallic strips on the top and bottom surfaces of a dielectric substrate with mirror symmetry, we show that spoof SPPs are supported from very low frequency to the cutoff frequency with strong subwavelength effects, which can be converted to the time-domain SPPs. When two such plasmonic waveguides are tightly packed with deep-subwavelength separation, which commonly happens in integrated circuits and wireless communications due to limited space, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that SPP signals on such two plasmonic waveguides have better propagation performance and much less mutual coupling than the conventional signals on two traditional microstrip lines with the same size and separation. Hence the proposed method can achieve significant interference suppression in very compact space, providing a potential solution to break the challenge of signal integrity. KEYWORDS: surface plasmon polaritons, time domain, signal integrity, interference suppression S ignal interference suppression and signal integrity are two of the most challenging topics in physics and electrical engineering. Especially, the rapid developments of super-largescale integration of high-speed circuits and wireless communication systems/devices have brought forward higher requirements for signal interference suppression and signal integrity in the past decades. 1−3 Some special circuit strategies have been proposed to improve the signal quality, such as the equalization technique 4 and differential microstrip lines. 5 However, in the above techniques, additional areas of circuits and power consumptions are required, which make them rather difficult to utilize in high-frequency and/or high-speed circuits and systems. In fact, signal integrity, signal interference suppression, and miniaturization are three key features to be solved simultaneously to achieve higher performance and smaller size of complicated circuits and systems. But these factors are almost contradictory using the traditional transmission lines. To solve the challenges, we are forced to find new physics models beyond traditional transmission lines, and the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) approach is one of the possibilities due to its strong subwavelength effects.At optical frequencies, because of the negative permittivity behavior of the metal and positive permittivity of the dielectric, SPPs are formed by the interaction between free electrons and the electromagnetic field 6,7 and propagate in parallel to the metal−diele...

The second harmonic generation is one of the most important applications of nonlinear effect, which has attracted great interests in nonlinear optics and microwave in the past decades. To the best of our knowledge, however, generating the second harmonics of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) has not been reported. Here, we propose to generate the second harmonics of spoof SPPs with high efficiency at microwave frequencies using subwavelength-scale nonlinear active device integrated on specially designed plasmonic waveguides, which are composed of two ultrathin corrugated metallic strips printed on the top and bottom surfaces of a thin dielectric slab anti-symmetrically. We show that the plasmonic waveguide supports broadband propagations of spoof SPPs with strong subwavelength effect, whose dispersion property can be controlled by changing the geometrical parameters. By loading the nonlinear device made from semiconductors to the intersection of two plasmonic waveguides with different corrugation depths, we experimentally demonstrate the efficient generation of second-harmonic SPPs in broad frequency band. The proposed second-harmonic generator can be directly used as SPP frequency multiplier, and the proposed method can be extended to achieve high-order harmonics and produce SPP mixers, which are essential to SPP integrated circuits and systems.

The proposed surface-matching registration method provides sufficient registration accuracy even in the posterior area of the head. The 3D point cloud of the entire head, including the facial surface and the back of the head, can be easily acquired using a portable 3D scanner. The scanner does not need to be calibrated prior or tracked by the optical tracking system during scanning.

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Transmission line is a basic component in all passive devices, integrated circuits, and systems. Microstrip is the most popular transmission line in the microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies, and has been widely used in current electronic devices, circuits, and systems. One of the important issues to be solved in such applications is the relatively large transmission loss of microstrip. Here, we propose a method to reduce the loss of microwave transmission line based on the designable wavenumber of spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). Using this characteristic, we analyze and experimentally demonstrate the low-loss feature of the SPP transmission line through the perturbation method and S-parameter measurements, respectively. Both simulation and experimental results show that the SPP transmission line has much smaller transmission loss than traditional microstrip with the same size in the microwave frequencies. Hence, the spoof SPP transmission line may make a big step forward in the low-loss circuits and systems.