Mode Matching Analysis and Design of Substrate Integrated Waveguide Components

Date

2014-11-14

Authors

Kordiboroujeni, Zamzam

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Abstract

The advent of Substrate Integrated Circuit (SIC) technology, and specifically Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) technology has made it feasible to design and fabricate low loss and high quality factor (Q-factor) microwave and millimeter wave structures on a compact and integrable layout and at a low cost. The SIW structure is the planar realization of the conventional rectangular waveguide (RWG). In this technology, the side walls of the waveguide are replaced with two rows of metallic vias, which are connecting two conductor sheets, located at the top and bottom of a dielectric slab. The motivation for this thesis has been to develop an analytical method to efficiently analyze SIW structures, and also design different types of passive microwave components based on this technology. As SIW structures are imitating waveguide structures in a planar format, the field distributions inside these structures are very close to those in waveguides. However, due to the very small substrate height in conventional planar technologies, and also the existence of a row of vias, instead of a solid metallic wall, there is a reduced set of modes in SIW compared to regular waveguide. This fact has given us an opportunity to deploy efficient modal analysis techniques to analyze these structures. In this thesis, we present a Mode Matching Techniques (MMT) approach for the analysis of H-plane SIW structures. One of the areas of application, which can significantly benefit from having an efficient analytical method, is designing and optimizing new circuits. Having such an analytical tool, which is faster than commercially available field solvers by an order of magnitude, new components can be designed, analyzed and optimized in a fast and inexpensive manner. Based on this technique, various types of passive microwave components including filters, diplexers, power dividers and couplers, some of which are among the first to be reported in SIW technology, are designed and analyzed in this thesis. Also based on this technique, the most accurate formula for the effective waveguide width of the SIW is presented in this thesis. In order to provide means to excite and measure SIW components, transitions between these structures and other planar topologies like microstrip and coplanar waveguide (CPW) are needed. More importantly, low-reflection transitions to microstrip are required to integrate SIW circuits with active components, and therefore it is vital to provide low-reflection transitions so that the component design is independent of the influences of the transitions. In this thesis, a new wideband microstrip-to-SIW transition, with the lowest reported reflection coefficient, is also introduced.

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Keywords

Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW), Mode Matching Techniques (MMT), Transition, Filter, Diplexer, Coupler, Power Divider

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