Yield-oriented design protocol and equivalent circuit model for W-band E-plane waveguide-to-microstrip transitions

Abstract

This work presents a comprehensive design protocol for a W-band E-plane waveguide-to-microstrip transition covering all aspects, from the probe design, matching, cut-off cavity size estimations, verification analysis with different 3D EM simulators, and the entire fabrication process, with special emphasis on tolerances and yield with optimized costs. In fact, a complete study of the manufacture yield is done without the need to fabricate a large number of units of the microstrip-to-waveguide transition by taking advantage of the Monte Carlo tools embedded in 3D EM simulators. A simple equivalent circuit model of the transition is proposed and validated to be used in W-band system level simulations. These are requirements to enable massive use of W-band products (i.e., concealed weapons detection, imaging, etc.) with reasonable costs. V C 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:77-91, 2014.

Design and fabrication of a W-band linear array of planar antennas and study for the enhancement of its radiation properties with a chiral metamaterial cover

“…The waveguide-to-microstrip transition is designed using the Rogers ULTRALAM 2000 substrate (ε r = 2.5, tgδ = 0.0019, copper thickness = 18µm, h = 4mils) and it is based on the previous design of a transition described in [6]. The design is shown in Fig.…”