Passive circuit designs toward terahertz using nanometer CMOS technology

This paper presents terahertz passive circuit design and investigation by using a 180 nanometer CMOS technology. A novel multimode bandpass filter and a power divider are designed by adopting a thin-film microstrip line, which uses silicon oxide layer of CMOS as the microstrip substrate. The circuit and full-wave electromagnetic results show that the proposed bandpass filter has a wide passband of 100∼150GHz and a return loss of better than 14dB. The designed power divider can operate at 500GHz which is the first reported design using a 180nm CMOS process.