Design and evaluation of realizable and compact low-impedance transmission lines for two top-metal-layer semiconductor processes

This paper compares three different narrow 12.5Ω lines regarding their insertion loss. All three lines are realizable on a two top-metal-layer semiconductor process. It turns out that an artificial LC/ telegrapher line, composed of high and low impedance line elements, has the lowest loss of all three presented lines. The investigation, which is based on EM simulations is verified by S-Parameter measurements of all three lines up to 325 GHz. For a length of 315 µm the LC line shows an insertion loss of 2.5 dB@200 GHz.