1. Coplanar waveguide (CPW) consists of a central metallic strip separated by narrow slots from an infinite ground plane, all on the same plane atop a dielectric substrate.
2. There are two main types of coplanar waveguides: classic CPW and finite ground-plane CPW, which provides a ground plane on the opposite side of the dielectric substrate.
3. CPW offers advantages like allowing active devices to be mounted directly on top and providing extremely high frequency response over 100 GHz. However, it also has disadvantages like potential for poor heat dissipation and lack of understanding within the microwave design community.
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1. Coplanar waveguide (CPW) consists of a central metallic strip separated by narrow slots from an infinite ground plane, all on the same plane atop a dielectric substrate.
2. There are two main types of coplanar waveguides: classic CPW and finite ground-plane CPW, which provides a ground plane on the opposite side of the dielectric substrate.
3. CPW offers advantages like allowing active devices to be mounted directly on top and providing extremely high frequency response over 100 GHz. However, it also has disadvantages like potential for poor heat dissipation and lack of understanding within the microwave design community.
1. Coplanar waveguide (CPW) consists of a central metallic strip separated by narrow slots from an infinite ground plane, all on the same plane atop a dielectric substrate.
2. There are two main types of coplanar waveguides: classic CPW and finite ground-plane CPW, which provides a ground plane on the opposite side of the dielectric substrate.
3. CPW offers advantages like allowing active devices to be mounted directly on top and providing extremely high frequency response over 100 GHz. However, it also has disadvantages like potential for poor heat dissipation and lack of understanding within the microwave design community.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
1. Coplanar waveguide (CPW) consists of a central metallic strip separated by narrow slots from an infinite ground plane, all on the same plane atop a dielectric substrate.
2. There are two main types of coplanar waveguides: classic CPW and finite ground-plane CPW, which provides a ground plane on the opposite side of the dielectric substrate.
3. CPW offers advantages like allowing active devices to be mounted directly on top and providing extremely high frequency response over 100 GHz. However, it also has disadvantages like potential for poor heat dissipation and lack of understanding within the microwave design community.
Copyright:
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Coplanar Waveguide
Definition A coplanar line is a structure in which all the conductors supporting wave propagation are located on the same plane, i.e. generally the top of a dielectric substrate. There exist two main types of coplanar lines: the first, called coplanar waveguide (CPW), that we will study here, is composed of a median metallic strip separated by two narrow slits from a infinite ground plane, as may be seen on the figure below.
The characteristic dimensions of a CPW are the central strip width and the width of the slots . The structure is obviously symmetrical along a vertical plane running in the middle of the central strip.
The other coplanar line, called a coplanar slot (CPS) is the complementary of that topology, consisting of two strips running side by side. Types of coplanar waveguide 1."Classic" coplanar waveguide (CPW) is formed from a conductor separated from a pair of groundplanes, all on the same plane, atop a dielectric medium. In the ideal case, the thickness of the dielectric is infinite; in practice, it is thick enough so that EM fields die out before they get out of the substrate.
2.A variant of coplanar waveguide is formed when a ground plane is provided on the opposite side of the dielectric, which is called finite ground-plane coplanar waveguide (FGCPW), or more simply, grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW).
The advantages of coplanar waveguide are that active devices can be mounted on top of the circuit, like on microstrip. More importantly, it can provide extremely high frequency response (100 GHz or more) since connecting to CPW does not entail any parasitic discontinuities in the ground plane. One disadvantage is potentially lousy heat dissipation (this depends on the thickness of the dielectric and whether it makes contact to a heat sink). However, the main reason that CPW is not used is that there is a general lack of understanding of how to employ it within the microwave design community. I don't want to scare you away from CPW, but a lot of CAD programs don't support it. This will change in the years to come as more millimeter-wave work will demand the benefits of CPW. Advantages and disadvantages of CPW In terms of circuit isolation, you can get great isolation using CPW, because there are always RF grounds between traces. Many examples of high-isolation RF switches have used grounded CPW to get 60 dB isolation or more. The advantage of having a thick substrate is realized when you fabricate CPW MMICs. The expense of backside processing (thinning, via etch, backside plating) is eliminated. Many companies that are currently developing GaN devices are employing CPW so they can concentrate on device technology and not have to figure out how to etch vias in silicon carbide or sapphire. With GaN technology, wafer slices are on the order of 12 mils thick, so for X-band devices, the height of the chip is well matched to 10 or 15 mil alumina.
For GaAs MMICs, wafer slices start out at 25 mils. If a CPW chip is mounted face-up, a severe height discontinuity can result. The way to get around this problem is to use flipchip technology, which is an advantage or a disadvantage depending on who you talk to! The ground inductance for shunt elements is quite low for CPW, compared to microstrip applications. This is because the RF ground is "right there", and you don't have to drill a via hole to connect to it (vias add inductance). As mentioned preciously, if you want to make compact circuits using narrow transmission lines, you must trade off RF loss. CPW circuits can be lossier than comparable microstrip circuits, if you need a compact layout. In terms of circuit size, CPW is at a disadvantage versus a stripline of microstrip circuit, because it's effective dielectric constant is lower (half of the fields are in air). Ground straps are always needed to tie the two grounds together in CPW, or weird things can happen. These are especially important around any discontinuity, such as a tee junction. Unintended spurious transmission modes can also happen. In a parallel-plate mode, the substrate acts like a dielectric-filled waveguide, and EM energy propagates along unintended paths. Don't get us wrong, if you know how to avoid this pitfall, CPW works great!
