Integrated Microstrip Transmission Line Modeling On Silicon Substrates

Abstract

This thesis presents a simple model for integrated microstrip transmission lines on silicon substrates. Due to recent technologies, there is a continuous minimization of electronics and portable electrical devices; it became necessary to reduce the size feature of electronic components, the development that led to the possibility of integrating microstrip transmission lines on-chip for silicon substrates instead of being off-chip as in prior times. Consequently, this led to more complications in the millimeter wave circuit designing, with the addition of extra restrictions, details and limitations. But more importantly, it introduced extra simulation load on the RF designer, in order to simulate the behavior of microstrips on electromagnetic simulators which consumes larger time than analog simulators. Hence, the need for modeling microstrip transmission lines came to the surface. This is done through a thorough and precise study for microstrip transmission lines, along with their behavior across high frequencies and the different models in literature that were introduced previously and how they are modified and optimized using an optimization code that was constructed on Scilab program. Then, the model implementation is explained through different types of ground planes for microstrip transmission lines that are categorized into solid ground planes and slotted ground plane, all of which are accompanied with various comparisons for the transmitted signal through the microstrip, in order to proof its robustness across different dimensions and technology variations along high frequency ranges that reaches up to 100GHz. Then different test cases are investigated for solid and slotted ground planes on both TCMS65nm and GF65nm technologies. The thesis is divided into six chapters that include a list of contents, tables and figures and a list of references used through our study. Chapter 1 This chapter presents a brief introduction to millimeter wave circuit design, the types of circuits that are used in that high frequency range and the challenges facing the millimeter wave designer nowadays. Then, the motivation for using microstrip transmission lines in such circuits. Chapter 2 In this chapter, we discuss the history of microstrip transmission lines, their theories of operations and different representations. Then, their complications and motivation for modeling the microstrips. Chapter 3 This chapter presents a literature survey for the different models presented in history that describes the behavior of microstrip transmission lines, a comparison between them and