Low-cost dielectric polymer waveguiding platform for sub-millimeter wave applications

Abstract

For wave guiding applications at sub-millimeter or terahertz frequencies, the currently adopted metallic waveguides will need to be scaled smaller and smaller in order to satisfy low order mode operation at high frequencies. However, as the size of the metallic waveguides is downscaled, the difficulty of fabricating such waveguides with high precision using conventional milling methods is increased and hence cost. In view of this problem, dielectric waveguides were proposed to guide sub-millimeter or terahertz waves. Nonetheless, the aim of these proposed dielectric waveguides is focused on transmission-line applications rather than as components in waveguide circuits. On the other hand, prior works on planar dielectric waveguide exists but these approaches faces tremendous fabrication difficulty and was not fabricated. In this thesis, we propose to use commercially available injection molding technique to fabricate a new sub-millimeter planar circuit platform that is low loss, low cost, mass producible and most importantly is also compatible with current adopted metallic waveguides for sub-millimeter wave applications and is able to be fabricated into waveguide circuit components. The study can be divided into four parts. First of all, the first section focuses on picking a low loss dielectric polymer as the material of the waveguide, measuring the absorption spectrum and calculating the refractive index and absorption coefficient of different polymers. Next section provides an insight to the fabrication process of the waveguides, such as design of the waveguide and the injection molding process. Then the measurement setup is discussed in the following section and the results of the fabricated waveguides are presented along with analysis. Finally, the thesis is concluded with some ongoing future works.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Yue Bun Edwin PUN (Supervisor)