A balanced ternary 2-9 decoder based on terahertz metasurface and its sensing applications

Abstract

With the development of terahertz communication technology, the demand for multi valued logic functional devices has increased sharply. Because, compared to binary logic devices, ternary logic devices can undertake more signal conversion with less input, reducing power consumption while also increasing information density. However, to our best knowledge, there are little works on terahertz metasurface multi value decoders. Therefore, A balanced ternary 2-9 decoder of terahertz metamaterials based on graphene and strontium titanate (STO) was proposed for the first time. By controlling voltage and temperature, 2-9 decoding functions can be achieved in the terahertz frequency band. The logic inputs can be -1, 0, and 1, belonging to multi valued logic devices. Numerical validation shows that when the device achieves 2-9 decoding function, the maximum modulation depth (MD) is 97.60%, the minimum extinction ratio (ER) is 1.05dB, and the maximum insertion loss (IL) is 0.21dB. At the same time, it has the characteristics of being insensitive to incident angle and polarization angle. In addition, the device can be used as a refractive index sensor and a temperature sensor, with sensitivities of 255.6 GHz/RIU and 1.12 GHz/K, respectively. The device has relatively good performance in decoding and sensing functions. Therefore, this work provides new ideas for improving the decoding capability in terahertz single-chip and designing terahertz multi value logic devices.