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The explosive growth in applications for microwave circuits and systems is demanding new approaches to circuit technology to satisfy system demands. With applications such as phased array antennas, satellite communications and car collision avoidance radar, there is a high volume demand for microwave circuits. Established circuit technologies, primarily thin film, are too high in cost to meet these demands. What is needed is a lower cost technology, but one that still offers high performance. Such a technology is described in this paper. Advanced thick film materials are combined with photoprocessing techniques to provide outstanding circuit performance. Line resolutions of 12 micron are available, together with via dimensions of 50 micron. The electrical performance of the materials is also excellent, with very high conductivity lines and low loss, low dielectric constant dielectric materials. The paper will briefly review this technology.The majority of the paper will be concentrated on describing examples of microwave components and their performance when fabricated using this technology. It will be shown that it is possible to equal or even exceed thin film performance at frequencies up to at least 80 GHz using the conductor material on ceramic substrates. Particular attention will be paid to novel microwave structures using the technology. A structure referred to as "Microstrip on Dielectric" will be illustrated and performance figures will be given. Due to the compact form of this structure, small size circuits with low material costs and hence low overall cost result. Test results on components fabricated using this approach will1 also be given.

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