Miniaturization of Transmission Lines: Meandered Slow-wave CPWs

This work presents novel transmission line structures based on Meandered Slow-wave CoPlanar Waveguides (MS-CPWs), aiming to achieve high miniaturization. As a proof-of-concept, these two kinds of transmission lines were designed and fabricated in the AMS 0.35 μm CMOS technology together with classical straight and meandered microstrip lines. Measurement results from 70 kHz to 100 GHz of the fabricated transmission lines are presented. At 80 GHz, all the considered transmission lines present similar quality factors, ranging between 10 and 14. On the other hand, at this frequency, one of the developed MS-CPW presents an effective dielectric constant of 88, while the meandered microstrip exhibits an equivalent effective dielectric constant of 51, thus leading to higher compactness for the MS-CPW.