High-Performance Coplanar Waveguide to Empty Substrate Integrated Coaxial Line Transition

Abstract

Recently, a new empty coaxial structure, entirely built with printed circuit boards, has been proposed. The resulting coaxial line has low radiation, low losses, high-quality factor, and is nondispersive. Up to now, this coaxial line has not been completely integrated in a planar substrate, since a working transition to a traditional planar line has not been defined yet. Therefore, in this paper, a high-quality transition from coplanar waveguide to this new empty coaxial line is proposed. With this transition, the coaxial line is completely integrated in a planar circuit board, so that it truly becomes an empty substrate-integrated coaxial line. The proposed transition has been fabricated. Both full-wave simulated and measured results show an excellent agreement. Therefore, the proposed transition is suitable to develop completely substrate-integrated components for applications in wideband communication systems that require very high quality responses and protection from external interferences. To show this fact, this new transition has been applied to integrate a high-performance empty coaxial filter in a planar substrate. The measured response of this filter is excellent, and proves the goodness of the proposed transition that has enabled, for the first time, the complete integration of an empty coaxial line in a planar substrate.