A Low-Loss Substrate-Independent Approach for 60-GHz Transceiver Front-End Integration Using Micromachining Technologies

This paper presents a low-loss, substrate-independent approach to integrate transceiver front-ends for 60-GHz wireless applications. Dielectric loss is eliminated by using polymer and bulk silicon micromachining technologies to create a cavity-based duplexer and a horn antenna in the air, above the substrate. A coplanar waveguide input is used for easy integration of the low-noise amplifier and power amplifier of the receiver and transmitter, respectively, with the micromachined passive module. A prototype is designed, fabricated, and characterized, with the transmit band (TX) set between 58.7-59.5 GHz and the receive band (RX) as 60.6-61.4 GHz. The proposed method offers an easy integration of both planar components and 3-D integrated modules on top of the substrate.