Silicon Micromachined Canonical ${\hbox{E}}$-Plane and ${\hbox{H}}$-Plane Bandpass Filters at the Terahertz Band

In this letter, several bandpass filters operating in the WR-1.5 band (500 to 750 GHz) are presented. The deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) silicon micromachining process is used for the fabrication of the filters. Two canonical filter topologies based on E- and H-plane are implemented. The work presented here has two specific objectives: a) to get important fabrication process parameters, such as tolerances, vertical angles, surface roughness, and repeatability and b) to validate the proper working of the waveguide filters in the terahertz band. These filters do not have any tuning element. Experimental results show better than 10 dB return loss and approximately 1 and 2.5 dB insertion loss (for 6% fractional bandwidth) for the E- and H-plane topology, respectively. The obtained results are in agreement with fabrication tolerances of 2 μm and vertical angles deviations up to 3°.