Defected Ground Structures

We receive several technical articles each month about circuits that utilize Defected Ground Structures (DGS) to improve performance. A DGS is where the ground plane metal is purposely modified with a certain geometry (and positioning of that geometry) to enhance performance. They can be used in various circuits with antennas, filters, delay lines, phase shifters, etc. to improve performance such as modifying the band pass/reject characteristics for filters or modifying the slow wave effect for delay lines or phase shifters.

While DGS may improve performance, these circuits are highly susceptible to the effects of the packaging since they radiate. Any physical structure near the DGS (within the EM field) will probably affect their performance. Therefore publishing results which show improved performance but do not include the adverse (and real-world) effects introduced by packaging would mislead our readers, so we have made it a policy not to publish papers on DGS without measured results which include these effects.

Because we stress the importance of practical applications, we want to make sure the circuit performance presented in an article reflects how it would perform if packaged and used in an application. I believe this is now the policy of the IEEE also for technical publications and we have adopted it too. So I wanted to state this policy here and get any feedback we can from design engineers and others. Let us know what you think by posting a comment.