A Silicon-Micromachined Waveguide Platform With Axial Ports for Integrated Sub-THz Filters

This article presents a new, very compact silicon-micromachined two-port waveguide platform that features axial ports but allows to integrate waveguide devices, which is enabled by integrated broadband, back-to-back, stepped E- and H-plane bends. This approach of rotating the waveguide plane in two axes enables devices of complex geometry to be directly mounted between two waveguide flanges. A prototype transition operating at 220–320 GHz has experimentally demonstrated an insertion loss of less than 0.2 dB and a return loss of better than 18.5 dB throughout the entire WM-864 waveguide band, characterized by an integrated on-chip waveguide calibration kit. Two 5th-order waveguide filters have been designed as complex demonstrator devices and co-fabricated with the proposed axial integration platform, demonstrating a direct-coupled filter at 270 GHz and a cross-coupled filter at 300 GHz with three transmission zeros. The filters with 1.85% and 2% fractional bandwidths demonstrate a measured insertion loss of 1.92 and 1.50 dB, respectively, to which the two transitions combined add a total of 0.3 dB, and a return loss of 19 and 15 dB in the passbands, respectively. The unloaded $Q$ -factors for the resonator cavities of the two filters were extracted to 750 and 900, respectively. These results are so far unparalleled for filters of similar complexity in this frequency range. The sensitivity to fabrication tolerances is analyzed.