Investigations On The Substrate Integrated Waveguide Technology

Following the rapidly development of modern microwave technology , specifications of microwave and millimeter-wave circuits and systems become more and more stricter. The tendency of modern microwave and millimeter-wave communication systems is small-size, low-weight, reliable, multifunctional and low-cost. Low-cost, mass-production, high-performance and high-yield microwave and millimeter-wave technologies are crucial for developing successful commercial low-cost microwave and millimeter-wave broadband systems. Hence, it is necessary to develop novel microwave and millimeter-wave integrated techniques. The Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) technique which can be integrated in the dielectric substrate with low insert-loss and low radiation-loss is a novel guided-wave structure developed in recent years. Using this technique, passive components and active devices can be efficiently integrated together, and then the size of microwave and millimeter-wave systems is effectively reduced and the whole system can be fabricated in the same PCB or package. Thus the costs of such systems are extremely cut down. Since the propagation character in SIW is similar to that in a conventional rectangular waveguide, the millimeter-wave and sub-millimeter-wave SIW components and sub-systems take a lot of merits such as high-Q, high power capability and easy integration etc. Additionally, due to SIW components are totally constructed by metallic-vias in the dielectric substrate, these components can be fabricated using printed-circuits-board (PCB), low-temperature-cofires-ceramic (LTCC) process or even thin-film process and integrated with other planar microwave circuits and chips without any expensive assembling. Compared to the fabrication costs of traditional waveguide microwave and millimeter-wave components, the costs of SIW components which do not need tedious post-fabrication tuning are very low, and they are very suitable for the designing and mass-production of microwave and millimeter-wave integrated circuits. Because the SIW is a newly arisen technology, many theoretical problems still remain unclear and their applications are still far from being completed.In this dissertation, designing high performance microwave and millimeter-wave components and integrated sub-systems with SIW technology are investigated.In the first chapter of this dissertation, some SIW-microstrip transitions are studied to easily...