Advanced photoimagable ceramic based technology: Substrate integrated waveguides and passives to multilayer cost-effective MCMs at MM-wave and beyond

This paper describes the realization of high performance substrate integrated waveguides (SIW) and components, and multilayer compact and high Q lumped elements and passives to complete mm-wave modules at a low cost using a novel multilayer ceramic based photoimageable thick film technology. The multilayer SIW shown to have lower loss compare to planer transmission lines at the higher side of millimeter-wave (mmW), and sub-mmW bands. Multilayer lumped components and circuits and other passive components have been realized with excellent performance and miniaturization. The lumped elements have been designed and modeled with very high SRF, up to 40 GHz. Finally, using a novel integration technique highly compact multilayer mmW multi-chip modules (MCMs) have been realize integrating MMICs with SIW components and other passives onto a single substrate. The performances of the passives and modules are comparable to the costlier thin film technology and better than most of the reported results from conventional MCM technologies.