Millimeter-wave Chip-to-Chip Interconnect Using Plastic Wire Operating in Single and Dual Mode

This work presents, for operation at millimeter-wave frequency, a transition between an integrated circuit and a flexible plastic dielectric rod waveguide attached perpendicularly to the circuit. A transition featuring low loss, small chip-area consumption and ease of mechanical alignment is obtained by a combination of an on-chip spherical dielectric resonator and a metallic circular waveguide resonator. The flexible plastic wire can be operated in two orthogonal polarization modes, thereby doubling the transmission capacity. Transmission loss of the transition from on-chip microstrip line to Teflon plastic wire is extracted from measurements. For the single-mode transition, transmission is -3.7 dB and -3.2 dB at 62 GHz and 103 GHz, respectively. For the dual-mode transition, loss is about 0.4 dB higher.