by Zoya Popovic, Sébastien Rondineau and Dejan Filipovic, University of Colorado; David Sherrer, Chris Nicholas, Jean-Marc Rollin and Ken Vanhille, Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials
How would you like to design circuits with perfectly shielded, low-loss, purely TEM broadband transmission lines, which could be stacked next to and on top of each other with no coupling? The lines can be tens of centimeters long, cross at multiple levels and at any angle, and holes could be left to plug in actives or other surface-mount components. Impossible? A radically new way to design and fabricate microwave and millimeter-wave circuits recently grew from an idea to reality: PolyStrata™ microfabrication technology offers the possibility of producing miniature, dense and very complex three-dimensional (3D) metallic-dielectric components with an unprecedented ability to go directly from 3D CAD drawings to identical intricate 3D miniature circuit components.1 As a result, one can now design dense multi-layer meshes of micro-coaxial cables that do not couple to each other and operate with low loss well into the millimeter-wave region.
Figure 1 shows a photograph of a portion of a phased array with reactively-loaded patch antennas and a feed network implemented in air-filled micro-coaxial lines made of copper. This is the first wafer-scale integrated coaxial millimeter-wave phased array that includes a Butler matrix coaxial beamformer, air-patch antennas, and MMIC switches and amplifiers. The entire phased array is 15 x 2 cm in area.
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