A simplified design of an inline transition between microstrip and rectangular waveguide is presented in this paper. The transition makes use of a dielectric filled rectangular waveguide (DFRW) as an intermediate step, which simplifies manufacturing and allows for an analytical design. The behavior of the transition has been experimentally validated in the W-band by means of a back-to-back configuration. Good performance has been achieved: a return loss greaterthan 10 dB and mean insertion loss lower than 1 dB.

In this paper two different simple to design and easy to manufacturing transitions from a microstrip to rectangular waveguide based on ridge and groove gap waveguides are studied. The first one is based on a combination of a groove and ridge gap waveguide. In this case, the microstrip substrate occupies the whole bottom metallic housing block, namely, the transition and the gap between the bed of nails and the lid; therefore, it does not require any substrate shaping. Nevertheless, the transition needs to replace groove waveguide by ridge gap waveguide sections to avoid higher-order mode excitation. In the second approach, based on only a groove gap waveguide, the substrate is shaped to be only in the microstrip section, that is, outside the bed of nails area. This leads to a simplification of the design procedure. Prototypes of both transitions have been characterized, showing good agreement with the simulations taking into account the manufacturing tolerances. Performance comparable to the state-of-the-art in this frequency band has been achieved.

The first part of this work is focused on the design of compact and affordable integrated multi-band detectors in the terahertz range. The proposed receivers are designed to obtain information of different spectral ranges in a single measurement, reducing instrument cost, size, weight, and power consumption. To this aim, two dual-band direct detectors are proposed. The first one integrates the submillimetre wave range and the IR range, whilst the second one is intended to operate at the millimetre and submillimetre wave ranges. The second part of this work merge concepts and technologies from both, electronics and photonics domains and may be a good starting point for the creation of new silicon integrated heterodyne detectors.