Microwave and Millimeter-wave Technologies (a1) ·lªi¤î²@¦ìªi §þ³n (a1) Principal Investigator ¡g Ching-kuang Tzuang ²ø´¸¥ú Iii. Project Description 1. Executive Summary

The advance of ACSS (Advanced Coplanar Strips System) in millimeter-wave module and RFIC designs has gained worldwide recognitions and become a pragmatic way for millimeter-wave system integration. The ACSS is a system of guiding structures embedded in a multilayered printed-circuit environment such as PCB (Printed-Circuit-Board) and LTCC (low-temparature-cofired-ceramics) for RF system-on-chip (SOC) design. This proposal, a continuation of the program titled " Microwave and Millimeter-wave Technologies A1 " is for the fourth year. This project is the last year of the four-year program beginning January 2000 as the sub-project of the program titled " Advanced Technologies for Telecommunications (A) " , lead by Professor S. T. Peng. Major tasks of this project A1 have been completed by the end of the third year (2002). The ACSS millimeter-wave transceiver module, which incorporates typical PCB process for making all-in-one module, has demonstrated all aspects of planar realizations of antennas, antenna arrays, resonators, filters, mixers, oscillators and packages. The ACSS exploits the multi-layered guiding system into the unprecedented domain, which creates new approaches for RFIC design and module integration. The unprecedented domain is best described by the concepts of the synthetic waveguides, in which most popularly known guiding modes such as planar (microstrip), quasi planar (CB-CPW), non-planar (rectangular waveguide) structures propagate freely in the multi-layered ACSS system with little degration of propagation losses or transition losses. The synthesized waveguides have two main features: 1) size reduction as compared to the design based on popularly known guiding structures, and 2) Q-value of the guide is maintained or much better than the conventional guides. In the previous year (2002), this project had reported five synthesized waveguides in addition to the streamline microstrip-rectangular waveguide mode converter. While expecting more of such synthesized waveguides awaiting development for advanced applications to cope with increasing complexity of RF transceiver system in quest of better RF transmission quality in a hostile jamming environment, this proposal aims to build an infrasture that enables continuation of ongoing researches in this exciting field of studies and produces fruitful impacts on the RF module and RF system-on-chip industries. 3 This proposal undertakes the IP (intellectual property) approach with the following purposes: 1) Making knowledge-based synthetic waveguides open to potential designers/researchers could be an effective way for technology proliferation that may essentially create more designs unimaginable at the present time. 2) Focusing on specific synthetic-waveguide IP and research development may produce verifiable and solid IP's …