| This thesis investigates substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) based interconnects, components, and systems. SIWs are high performance broadband interconnects with excellent immunity to electromagnetic interference and suitable for use in microwave and millimetre-wave electronics, as well as wideband systems. They are very low-cost in comparison to the classic milled metallic waveguides as they may be developed using inexpensive printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication techniques. In this thesis, the interconnect design is studied by investigating the modes supported by SIW using fullwave simulations. Also, SIW transitions, as well as miniaturization methods to decrease the waveguide footprint are evaluated. Next, a miniaturized Wilkinson SIW power divider is developed exhibiting excellent isolation of up to 40dB between its output ports. Another SIW component investigated in this thesis is an SIW cavity resonator. A circular SIW cavity resonator fed by a microstrip line and via probe through an opening on the top cavity wall is designed. The aperture on the top wall creates a radiating folded slot and measurements show a gain of 7.76dB for this cavity-backed antenna at 16.79GHz. The antenna exhibits a bandwidth of 250MHz (return loss > 10dB). With this resonator, a microwave oscillator is designed to produce a 10dBm tone. Measurements of the fabricated oscillator demonstrate a low phase noise of -82dBc/Hz. Finally, a new SIW component, i.e. tapered SIW reflector, is designed to counteract the dispersive behavior of an SIW interconnect near cutoff. Two dispersion equalization systems are implemented using either a circulator or a coupler to route the compensated reflected signal. The systems are tested when a 1Gbps pseudo-random binary signal is up-converted to 10.7GHz and launched into the SIW interconnect. Observation of the compensated output eye-diagrams reveals achievement of a lower distortion in the highly dispersive band just above the cutoff frequency. |
