A fully printed multilayer metamaterial with broadband, low-loss negative index

A novel, fully printed implementation of the multilayer negative-refractive-index transmission-line (NRI-TL) metamaterial is presented. The constituent metamaterial unit cell consists of a two-dimensional coplanar-strip transmission-line (CPS-TL) host medium loaded using metal-insulator-metal-(MIM-) type capacitors and meandered inductors distributed across the two metallization layers of a standard substrate. A representative design is shown to achieve a unit-cell size smaller than one-twentieth of the operating wavelength, leading to a fractional NRI bandwidth of 36% and figure-of-merit of over 29.