Study on Characteristics of Various RF Transmission Line Structures on PES Substrate for Application to Flexible MMIC

Abstract

In this work, the coplanar waveguide is fabricated on a PES (poly[ether sulfone]) substrate for application to a flexible monolithic microwave integrated circuit, and its RF characteristics were thoroughly investigated. The quality factor of the coplanar waveguide on PES is 40.3 at a resonance frequency of 46.7 GHz. A fishbone-type transmission line (FTTL) structure is also fabricated on the PES substrate, and its RF characteristics are investigated. The wavelength of the FTTL on PES is 5.11 mm at 20 GHz, which is 55% of the conventional coplanar waveguide on PES. Using the FTTL, an impedance transformer is fabricated on PES. The size of the impedance transformer is 0.318 mm × 0.318 mm, which is 69.2% of the size of the transformer fabricated by the conventional coplanar waveguide on PES. The impedance transformer showed return loss values better than –12.9 dB from 5 GHz to 50 GHz and an insertion loss better than –1.13 dB in the same frequency range.