Owing to simple structure, low cost and high performance, NRD-guide millimeter wave circuits have attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, a variety of NRD-guide passive components are reviewed with emphasis on design techniques and performance estimation in the 60 GHz frequency band where the license-free advantage is available. The passive components to be discussed here include compact bends, wideband hybrid couplers, practical three-port junctions, versatile E-plane filters, and effective feeding structures for lens antennas. Some of them are employed to construct millimeter wave transceivers. Eye patterns observed at 1.5 Gbps confirm the potential ability of the fabricated NRD-guide transceivers for high bit-rate, wireless applications.

Microwave measurement methods necessary to characterize copper-clad dielectric laminate substrates are reviewed to realize more precise design of planar circuits: that is, the balanced-type circular disk resonator method for the relative complex permittivity in the normal direction ε_rn and tan δ_n, the cavity resonator method and the cut-off waveguide method for one in the tangential direction ε_rt and tan δ_t, and the dielectric resonator method for the surface and interface conductivity of copper foil σ_s and σ_i. The measured results of the frequency and temperature dependences of these parameters are presented for a PTFE substrate and a copper-clad glass cloth PTFE laminate substrate.

New microstrip bandpass filters with extended stopband bandwidths are proposed by using new asymmetric stepped-impedance hairpin resonators (ASIHRs). The size of the proposed resonators has been reduced around 16%, comparing with the conventional stepped-impedance hairpin resonators (SIHRs) structure. The first bandpass filter is a combination of differ resonators with the same fundamental frequency but differ in harmonic frequencies, resulting in improved suppression spurious responses in stopbands. Furthermore, another bandpass filter uses the ASIHRs periodically loaded on a microstrip line to improve stopband characteristics. The proposed filters not only have compact size of resonators, but also provide improved upper stopband characteristics. The proposed filters provide 20 dB rejection levels in the stopband up to 6f₀. The measured filters responses agree very well with the simulated expectations.

An ultra-deep polymer cavity structure exposed using deep X-ray lithography is used as a template for metal electroforming to produce a 24-GHz cavity resonator. The metal cavity is 1.8 mm deep and has impressive structure, including extremely vertical and smooth sidewalls, resulting in low conductor loss. The measured resonator has an unloaded quality factor of above 1800 at a resonant frequency of 23.89 GHz.

A new unified method is proposed to calculate the basic resonator parameters, i.e., the resonant frequency, external Q, unloaded Q and coupling coefficient in the time domain. By exciting the resonator from a weakly coupled external circuit, one can inject only a narrow resonant spectrum from the broad spectrum of the excitation pulse. The resonant frequency is easily counted by the number of zero crossings of the internal field intensity, whereas the Q's are calculated by the decay rate of the field amplitude. The coupling coefficient computed by the energy exchange rate between two resonators completes the new time domain algorithm.

Bandpass filters with broad bandwidth (up to 70%), very wide upper stopband (nearest spurious passband occurs up to five times of passband center frequency (f₀)), good stopband rejection performance (better than -30-40 dB in the whole stopband region), and matching with the conventional low cost printed circuit board process with low dielectric constant substrates are proposed in this paper. The proposed filters are designed using parallel-coupled vertically installed planar stepped-impedance resonators (VIPSIRs), which adopt the inherent nature of very tight coupling of VIP coupled line and extremely high impedance of VIP line. The extremely tightly coupled line enables the proposed filters having very wide passband and the extremely high impedance of VIP line leads to extremely large low-to-high impedance ratio that pushes the nearest spurious passband up to 5f₀. Both VIP coupled line and VIP high impedance line are analyzed and characterized by the design charts. The design procedures based on the design charts are verified by several experimental examples. The measured results agree very well with the simulated ones.

A periodically loaded ultra wideband (UWB) bandpass filter based on the electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) concept is presented. Compact wideband filters with steep transition bands can be designed easily using this novel methodology. Unit cells in the EBG circuit model are realized by capacitive and inductive parallel loading of a transmission line. These unit cells are cascaded to realize bandpass filters whose bandwidth depends on the reactive loading of unit cells. The number of unit cells determines the steepness of the band edges of the filter. The main advantage lies in the fact that the size of unit cells can be small because electrical length of transmission line segments in unit cells can be chosen arbitrarily, hence the final filter structure becomes small in size. A microstrip filter with 60% bandwidth is designed and the physical size is compared with a conventional wideband bandpass filter designed with quarter wavelength admittance inverters.

This study presents a class of miniature parallel-coupled bandpass filters with good selectivity and stopband rejection. Capacitive terminations are introduced to the conventional anti-parallel coupled-lines, and lumped-element K-inverters are employed, to achieve both size reduction and spurious suppression. Additionally, the capacitive cross-coupling effect can be introduced to obtain three transmission zeros to enhance the selectivity. Suitable equivalent-circuit models, along with design formulae, are also established. Specifically, via design examples, this work demonstrates the feasibility of proposed filter structures in microstrip configuration. Compared to the conventional parallel-coupled filters, the proposed filters exhibit over 60% size reduction, improved selectivity, and wider stopbands up to four times the center frequency.

In this paper, a notch-band implemented UWB bandpass filter was proposed. The filter was realized by integrating a full ultra-wideband bandpass filter using broadside coupling structure with a bandstop filter using in-line open stub. The in-line open stub was installed in the removed area in the broadside coupled microstrip conductors, which demonstrated a narrow notch-band performance. The proposed filters were designed based on the electromagnetic simulation and fabricated using a wet etching system. Parameter study of length dependence of the notch-band was carried out. The first resonant frequency of the in-line stub appears when the length is approximately equal to one quarter of the guided wavelength. Based on this fact, the notch-band can be adjusted to almost any specified band in the UWB passband. A three-section notch-band implemented filter demonstrated good characteristics: its full frequency bandwidth form 2.8 GHz to 10.2 GHz, good insertion loss of 0.6 dB and 1.0 dB at the centers of the first and second bands respectively, and flat and small group delay of less than 0.40 ns over main pass band, and a large attenuation stopband about 55 dB at 5.63 GHz. A lowpass filter was also introduced in order to improve the out-band performance, by which the measured results show an excellent attenuation better than 30 dB from 10.4 GHz to 17.8 GHz.

This paper presents the ultrawideband filters for UWB fullband (range of 3.1-10.6 GHz) applications. This filter consists of ring filter for wide-bandwidth and coupled line structure for suppressing unwanted passband in upper and lower stopbands. Especially, the filter structure was realized on silicon substrate using thin film technology, adequate for wafer level packaging, which can be integrated with CMOS UWB chipset that is currently on development. To minimize the dimension of the filter, the Hilbert structure was applied in ring filter and the meander shaped broadside coupled structure was also adopted in the coupled line structure. The size of the fully realized filter structure is 4.43.6 mm². The insertion loss in passband is 1.5 dB and the return loss is larger than 15 dB, respectively. The group delay in center frequency is 0.2 ns and the group delay variation is less than 0.15 ns.

Comb capacitors suitable for use in advanced complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology nodes are frequently constructed from low metal layers located closely above the conductive silicon substrate. This results in high parasitic capacitances across the thin dielectric between the two layers. Therefore, a shield for reducing this parasitic capacitance is proposed in order to use the comb capacitor at high frequency. From electromagnetic (EM) simulation results using a 3D EM simulator, the quality factor (Q-factor) of the proposed shielded comb capacitor for the differential signal improved by 20% at 30-110 GHz compared to the unshielded capacitor. Consequently, a scalable model is proposed, which operates up to millimeter-wave frequencies. The results are verified by experimental data using fabricated comb capacitors from a 90 nm 1P9M CMOS process. Compared with the experimental results, the simulated common-mode and differential-mode S parameters of the model has a root-mean-square (r.m.s.) error of under 2.1%.

This paper presents some structures of artificial coplanar waveguide with very slow phase velocity and their applications to a design of compact 3-dB branch-line couplers. The slow-wave structure is constructed by periodically loading both of series inductance and shunt capacitance. First, a basic miniature branch-line coupler is designed and consequently considerable size-reduction of about 1/4 is obtained. Next, a broadband design technique is described using open-circuited quarter-wavelength series-stubs added at each port as a matching network. By size-reducing the series-stubs and branchline sections, a very compact broadband coupler with a good hybrid performance over a wide bandwidth of 31 percent or more is realized. The design concepts and procedures are verified both numerically and experimentally.

This paper presents a free access mat consisting of tightly coupled double layered microstrip resonator array to provide an easy access for devices in short range wireless communications. While in a conventional wireless access system the electromagnetic wave is radiated from a device to another through the free space using built-in antennas, the proposed wireless access system uses the free access mat to propagate the wave and the proximate coupling between the waveguide and the devices. The propagation loss in the mat is small, which is demonstrated by numerical simulation for basic elements of the free access mat. We also demonstrate small transmission loss including the coupling loss between dipole antennas and the free access mat. Finally experimental confirmation for all demonstrated characteristics is provided so that the free access mat is effective as a novel waveguide for a short range wireless access systems.

A metallic waveguide with dual in-line dielectric rods can propagate electromagnetic waves more than two times higher than the cutoff frequency region and without higher modes [1]. If the straight portion in the waveguide has even symmetry, then dielectric rods are only required in the bent portion. Connection losses between the portions are improved by adding other dielectric rods.

A wideband NRD guide and rectangular waveguide H-plane transition is proposed to transfer millimeter waves from a dielectric strip to the outer conductor surface of NRD guide through a short length of waveguide made through the conductor plate. As a result, it has a bandwidth about 6.7 GHz of |S₁₁| -15 dB and a low transition loss about 0.35 dB at 60 GHz band.

This letter describes a millimeter wave slot array antenna using a rectangular waveguide and a ferrite. The radiation direction of the leaky wave from the slot array can be scanned by applying a dc bias magnetic field parallel to the ferrite. The radiation pattern of a prototype antenna has been measured at 40 GHz. The main beam direction changes from 10 to 3 degree by the bias magnetic field of 0.73 T.

We propose a new label recognition system for photonic label routing network. Binary-coded labels in binary phase-shift-keying format are considered. The system consists of an optical waveguide circuit with tree-structure passive asymmetric X-junctions and time gates. The system uses self-routing propagation of an identifying bit by performing interference with address bits. The identifying bit is placed in advance of the address bits in the label. The identifying bit pulse is routed to the destination output port corresponding to the code of the address. The operation principle is described. It is shown that all the binary number codes can be recognized with this system. We discuss the feasibility of the system by evaluating its crosstalk. To reduce the crosstalk, an improved scheme is also presented. The label recognition operation with the optical waveguide device is verified by numerical simulation using the finite-difference beam propagation method.

A method of sequential circuit synthesis is proposed for Single-Flux-Quantum (SFQ) digital circuits. Since all logic gates of SFQ digital circuits are driven by a clock signal, methods of sequential circuit synthesis for semiconductor digital circuits cannot derive the full power of high-throughput computation of SFQ circuit technology. In the method, a 'state module' consisting of a DFF and several AND gates is used. First, states of a sequential machine are encoded by one-hot encoding and state modules are assigned to the states one-by-one, and then, the modules are connected with each other according to the state transition. For the connection, Confluence Buffers (CBs), i.e., merger gates without clock signals are used. Consequently, gates driven by a clock signal are removed from its feedback loops, and therefore, a high-throughput SFQ sequential circuit is achieved. The experimental results on benchmark circuits show that compared with a conventional method for semiconductor digital circuits, the proposed method synthesizes circuits that work with 4.9 times higher clock frequency and have 17.3% more gates on average.

In this paper, an inverse S-shaped slotted ground structure (S-SGS) is proposed and analyzed. The S-SGS generates dual attenuation poles that can be easily controlled by its structure parameters. The equivalent circuit of the S-SGS consists of lumped elements that can be extracted from the measured S parameters. Moreover, several S-SGS cells are applied to form a miniaturized lowpass filter (LPF), which has a smaller area and a wider stopband in comparison to previous works.

A complementary cross-coupled differential Colpitts voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is reported. The combination of gm-boosting and the complementary transistors allows record low power integrated VCO implementation. The proposed VCO and the corresponding parallel quadrature VCO (P-QVCO) are implemented using 0.25-µm CMOS technology for 1.8 GHz operation. Measurements for the VCO and P-QVCO show phase noise of -116.8 and -117.7 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, while dissipating only 0.4 and 1.1 mA from a 0.9-V supply, respectively.

A compact OTA suitable for low-voltage active-RC and MOSFET-C filters is presented. The input stage of the OTA utilises the NMOS pseudo-differential amplifier with PMOS active load. The output stage relies upon the dual-mode feed-forward class-AB technique (based on an inverter-type transconductor) with common-mode rejection capability that incurs no penalty on transconductance/bias-current efficiency. Simulation results of a 0.5-V 100-kHz 5th-order Chebyshev filter based on the proposed OTA in a 0.18 µm CMOS process indicate SNR and SFDR of 68 dB and 63 dB (at 50 kHz+55 kHz) respectively. The filter consumes total power consumption of 60 µW.