A Wideband Millimeter-Wave Substrate Integrated Coaxial Line Array for High-Speed Data Transmission

Substrate integrated coaxial line (SICL) is a kind of planar transmission line, which can guarantee the propagation of transverse electromagnetic mode wave within a wide band. In this paper, a multichannel SICL array with coaxial lines placed in both vertical and horizontal directions is proposed for high-speed parallel data transmission. The adjacent channels of the SICL array share outer conductors for high-density integration. Moreover, the outer conductor is enhanced by metal fence to suppress the crosstalk between adjacent channels of the SICL array. In addition, a quasi-coaxial transition is designed for the proposed SICL array. A systematical design procedure is given to determine the physical dimensions of SICL array with transitions. The SICL array has flat group delay so that data can be transmitted without significant phase distortion. It is suitable for high-density integration and high-speed data transmission due to the low crosstalk and high bandwidth. To verify the advantage of the proposed SICL array, a 15 x 3 channel prototype is designed and fabricated in low temperature co-fired ceramic. The measured S-parameters agree well with the simulated results. The maximum bandwidth of a single channel of the SICL array is up to 56 GHz and the coupling of adjacent channels in the SICL array is less than -30 dB. Data rate of 30 Gb/s is measured for each channel with good eye diagram and low bit error rate, and hence, a total 1.35-Tb/s data rate can be achieved with the proposed 15 x 3 channel SICL array.