938 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 60, NO.

4, APRIL 2012

A Broadband and Vialess Vertical

Microstrip-to-Microstrip Transition
Xiaobo Huang and Ke-Li Wu, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—A novel, broadband, vialess, and vertical mi-

crostrip-to-microstrip transition is proposed in this paper. The
transition consists of two open-circuited microstrip resonators
and a U-shaped resonant-slot on the common ground plane. A
physics-based equivalent-circuit model is developed for inter-
preting its working mechanism and facilitating the design process.
The transition is analogous to a three-pole resonator filter. Based
on the equivalent-circuit model, the coupling coefficients of the
physical circuit can be calculated from the group delay infor-
mation of two segregated electromagnetic models. To effectively
control the couplings, a modified configuration is also proposed.
A prototype transition is designed using the proposed design for-
mulas. The fabricated circuit is measured to validate the proposed
transition and the equivalent-circuit model. Good agreement
is obtained between not only the measured and the simulated
performance, but also the designed and the extracted-circuit
Fig. 1. Conventional configurations of microstrip-to-microstrip transitions.
model. In addition to the wide bandwidth, the features of vialess (a) Transition using a via-hole. (b) Aperture-coupled transition. (c) Cavity-cou-
and easy fabrication make the novel transition very attractive for pled transition.
system-on-package applications.
Index Terms—Broadband, equivalent circuit, microstrip transi-
tions, multilayer circuits.
The large-scale integration of functional modules in a
system-on-package (SOP) or a system-on-chip (SOC) module
I. INTRODUCTION usually requires many vertical interconnections between mul-
tiple passive and active circuits and monolithic microwave
integrated circuits (MMICs) built on different layers. In order

W IRELESS communication systems operating at mi-

crowave and millimeter-wave frequencies have been
widely used for gigabit/second-rate data transmission of a
to achieve a good electric performance, the interconnections
should provide a very low insertion loss over a broad frequency
bandwidth. Furthermore, the interconnection structures need
point-to-point or a point-to-multipoint last-mile solution of to be easily fabricated. Traditionally, vertical via structures,
wireless local area networks. The fast growing market for such shown in Fig. 1(a), are most commonly used in a 3-D integrated
a system drives the increasing demands of highly integrated architecture [3]–[5]. However, a via-hole is a low-pass circuit
subsystems and modules for the high-frequency bands. Similar and exhibits unwanted parasitic effects at high frequencies.
to the integration technologies for RF frequency bands, due to Moreover, via-holes are not compatible with lithography-based
the design flexibility, low manufacturing cost, and suitability etching processsing for silicon-carrier-based millimeter-wave
for high-volume production 3-D multilayer integration tech- circuits. Enhanced bandwidth is obtained from the aper-
nologies, such as wafer-level silicon-based heterogeneous chip ture-coupled transitions, as shown in Fig. 1(b), by changing
technologies, silicon through-vias (TSVs), and vertical inter- the shape of the aperture or microstrip terminal [6]–[8]. These
connection using low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC), works are basically two-pole bandpass circuits. Moreover, no
have drawn a great deal of attention from the industry for physically clear design guidelines are given for engineers to
millimeter-wave and terahertz applications [1], [2]. follow in these studies. Cavity-coupled transitions illustrated in
Fig. 1(c) are proposed for transferring signals through several
Manuscript received July 19, 2011; revised January 10, 2012; accepted Jan- substrate layers [9]–[12]. As a matter of fact, the cavity can be
uary 12, 2012. Date of publication February 24, 2012; date of current version
regarded as an aperture in a thick common ground plane. Com-
April 04, 2012. This work was supported by the Research Grants Council of the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China under Grant 2150647. pared to the aperture- coupled transitions, the cavity-coupled
X. Huang was with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese type has a relatively narrower bandwidth due to only one cavity
University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. He is now with the China
resonator between the two microstrip lines. On the other hand,
Research and Development Center, Comba Telecommunication Systems,
Guangzhou 510530, China (e-mail: xbhuang@ee.cuhk.edu.hk). the cavity has via-walls and the manufacturing difficulties are
K.-L. Wu is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese inevitable in via forming for high-frequency applications.
University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong (e-mail: klwu@ee.cuhk.edu.hk).
In this study, a novel vialess configuration of a microstrip-
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. to-microstrip transition for vertical interconnection is presented.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMTT.2012.2185945 The transition performs as a three-pole band-pass filter, which

0018-9480/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE

HUANG AND WU: BROADBAND AND VIALESS VERTICAL MICROSTRIP-TO-MICROSTRIP TRANSITION 939

Fig. 2. Basic physical structure of the proposed transition.

creates three reflection zeros in the passband. An equivalent-cir-

cuit model is developed for interpreting the working mechanism Fig. 3. Equivalent-circuit model of the proposed transition.
of the proposed transition. The equivalent-circuit model reveals
that the coupling coefficients of a physical transition circuit can
be extracted by the group-delay information of two segregated three reflection zeros in the passband. As compared to the pub-
sub-circuits. An optimal circuit model with realizable coupling lished vialess microstrip-to-microstrip transitions of prior art,
coefficients can very well predict the electric performance and the proposed transition potentially provides a wider bandwidth.
provide the design objectives for an accurate electromagnetic
(EM) design. For further increasing the operating bandwidth,
a modified structure of the transition is also presented and in- III. WORKING PRINCIPLE AND EQUIVALENT-CIRCUIT MODEL
vestigated to achieve the optimal bandwidth. For demonstrative
purposes, a prototype of the proposed transition is designed at In order to illustrate the working mechanism of the transition,
microwave band and fabricated to validate the equivalent-cir- an equivalent-circuit model using transmission lines and ideal
cuit model and the design formulas. Good agreement of the EM transformers is proposed in Fig. 3. The circuit model comprises
simulated and the measured results is obtained, which validates four transformers, two open-circuited quarter-wavelength
the proposed transition and illustrates the deterministic design resonators and two shunt short-circuited quarter-wavelength
procedure. resonators. The transformers in the circuit represent the EM
couplings between the input/output transmission lines and the
resonators. The U-shaped slot is represented by two parallel
short-circuited quarter-wavelength slotline resonators. Specifi-
II. DESCRIPTION OF THE PROPOSED TRANSITION cally, transformers and represent the couplings between
the U-shaped slotline resonator and the microstrip lines, while
Fig. 2 shows an exploded conceptual view of the basic struc- transformers and characterize the couplings between the
ture of the proposed microstrip-to-microstrip transition. A more open-circuited microstrip resonators and the input and
developed structure will be discussed in Section V for practical the output microstrip lines, respectively.
implementation. The transition consists of two open-circuited
microstrip quarter-wavelength resonators, one of which A. Coupling Coefficient for Open-Circuit Resonators
is printed on the top of the upper substrate, the other, formed
at the bottom of the lower substrate, and finally, a half wave- In the equivalent-circuit model shown in Fig. 3, there are four
length U-shaped slotline resonator is etched on the common interlaced resonators: two open-circuited quarter-wavelength
ground plane. The microstrip resonators are placed per- microstrip line resonators and a pair of shunt short-circuited
pendicularly to the middle section of the U-shaped slotline. The slotline quarter-wavelength resonators. Having appropriately
coupling between them can be controlled by the width of the determined the dimensions of the four resonators for a given
slotline and an offset displacement from the center. The open center frequency, designing the physical dimensions of a tran-
ends are deliberately placed approximately away from the sition for realizing the four required coupling transformers,
middle section to create an open-circuited resonator. In namely, , , , and will be critical.
general, the couplings between the input/output microstrip lines It is known that an open-circuited quarter-wavelength mi-
and the resonators are created by the discontinuity on the crostrip line can be approximated by a series resonator cir-
ground plane. In addition, the difference between the charac- cuit. Therefore, the coupling circuit of the input microstrip line
teristic impedance of the input/output microstrip line and that and a open-circuited resonator, as depicted in Fig. 4(a),
of the open-circuited quarter-wavelength transmission line can can be represented by the lumped-element circuit of Fig. 4(b).
also control the couplings. Therefore, based on the coupling ar- Note that by definition of an ideal transformer with turns ratio
rangement, the operational principle of the transition can be well , there is , where is the resistance looking to-
explained by the concept of a three-pole band-pass filter having ward the transformer from the resonator and is the source
940 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 60, NO. 4, APRIL 2012

Fig. 5. (a) Coupling circuit between a transmission line and a pair of short-cir-
Fig. 4. (a) Coupling circuit between a transmission line and an open-circuited cuited shunt resonators by an ideal transformer. (b) Corresponding lumped
resonator by an ideal transformer. (b) Corresponding lumped element cir- element circuit model of (a).
cuit model of (a).

More specifically,
resistance, or the characteristic impedance of the input mi-
crostrip line in the physical model. Therefore, the external of
the series resonator circuit of Fig. 4(b) at the resonant fre- (7)
quency is

(1) where .
It can be found that at resonance the group delay of the re-
where the notation refers to the coupling coefficient or flection coefficient is
.
For the quarter-wavelength open-circuited resonant circuit in (8)
Fig. 4(a), where , in the vicinity of resonant frequency
, the input impedance of the res- The above relation is not new and is valid for any single res-
onator onator circuit [13]. It is reexamined here for illustrative pur-
poses. It can be seen that once is obtained from (8), the cou-
pling coefficient can be determined by (5).

B. Coupling Coefficient for U-Shaped Slotline Resonator

At resonant frequency, the open-circuited quarter-wavelength
(2) resonators will short-circuit transformers 2 and 4 and the cou-
plings and become isolated, where the notation
whereas its counterpart in the equivalent circuit of Fig. 4(b) refers to the coupling coefficient or . Thus, the coupling
looking into the series resonator can be expressed by circuit between the microstrip line and the half-wavelength
slotline resonator can be represented by an ideal transformer
(3) coupled to a pair of shunt short-circuited slotline resonators of
length , as shown in Fig. 5(a), whose input admittance is given
by
Comparison of (2) to (3) leads to the inductance of the equiv-
alent circuit
(9)

(4)
Since a short-circuited quarter-wavelength transmission line
can be approximated by a shunt circuit, the physical cir-
Thus, (1) for the external reduces to cuit of a transmission-line coupled half-wavelength U-shaped
slotline resonator, which is abstracted by Fig. 5(a), can be rep-
(5) resented by the lumped-element circuit of Fig. 5(b).
By a similar procedure as that for finding coupling coefficient
, it is straightforward to find that for the circuit of Fig. 5(b),
That is to say, if the external for the circuit in Fig. 4(a)
can be measured from reflection coefficient , for a set of
(10)
predefined and , the coupling coefficient can then
be extracted by (5).
By examining Fig. 4 and using the definition of an ideal trans- and that the group delay of the reflection coefficient is related to
former, the reflection coefficient looking at the input port of the the external by (8).
microstrip line is given by From the above discussion, it can be seen that the U-shaped
slot is an optimal geometry that is most pertinent to the circuit
model, very convenient in controlling the couplings and small
and (6)
in footprint.
HUANG AND WU: BROADBAND AND VIALESS VERTICAL MICROSTRIP-TO-MICROSTRIP TRANSITION 941

Fig. 7. Models for calculating the coupling coefficients. (a) For calculating
or . (b) For calculating or .
Fig. 6. Top view of the microstrip-to-microstrip transition.

U-shaped slotline resonator and the lower level microstrip line

IV. DESIGN GUIDELINES into consideration. In the proposed manner, all the coupling
Fig. 6 shows the top view of the proposed microstrip- to-mi- coefficients can be determined one by one independently by
crostrip transition, in which the related dimensional variables using the group-delay information of each corresponding EM
are also defined. The Zeland IE3D and Agilent ADS simula- model at the center frequency.
tion software are used for EM simulation of the physical struc- The initial dimensions of a transition can be obtained by the
ture and circuit-model simulation of the proposed circuit model, process given above. The final dimensions will be determined
respectively, in this study. The substrate used in this study is by a few steps of manual tuning using the concept of space-map-
Rogers Duroid 5880 with dielectric constant of 2.22 and a thick- ping optimization technique, which are: 1) EM simulation re-
ness of 0.508 mm. The loss tangent of the material is 0.0009 and sponse of an unoptimized transition (fine model) is curve fitted
the thickness of the cladding copper is 0.017 mm. The design by the response of corresponding circuit model described by
process starts with an optimal circuit model for the frequency Fig. 2 (coarse model); 2) the extracted-circuit model is com-
band of interest, which can be obtained by a circuit-level simu- pared to the optimized circuit model (golden template) for ob-
lator such as ADS with specified characteristic impedances and taining the error vector; and 3) a new EM simulation will be
initial electrical lengths of the resonator stubs. Here, the charac- conducted using the updated fine model according to the error
teristic impedances include those of I/O transmission lines and vector. The process will be repeated for a few numbers of iter-
those of transmission line composing the resonators in the phys- ation. Once the extracted-circuit model is close enough to the
ical model; optimal electrical lengths determine the res- golden template, an optimized transition design is achieved.
onators at appropriate resonance frequencies. Due to the sim-
plicity of the equivalent-circuit model, it is a trivial task to op- V. BANDWIDTH ENHANCEMENT AND SIZE REDUCTION
timize the circuit model that operates in the desired frequency In order to investigate the relationship between the couplings
bandwidth. The optimized circuit model should provide all the and the bandwidth, a parametric study based on the equivalent
realizable coupling coefficients and serves as the coarse model circuit shown in Fig. 3 is conducted. Fig. 8 shows the simulated
in a space-mapping-like design process for the final physical return losses of the optimized circuit model with the variation
model [14]. of coupling coefficients and . For simplicity, the charac-
Usually a 50- microstrip line printed on the substrate is teristic impedances at the two ports are 50 and the electric
used for the I/O port and open-circuited quarter-wavelength res- length of each quarter-wavelength resonators is 90 at the center
onators in the physical model. The total length of the U-shaped frequency of 7 GHz. Considering the symmetry of the circuit
slotline resonator is designed to be a half guided wavelength. model, it is assumed that and . It can be ob-
Changing the width of the slotline not only changes its charac- served from Fig. 8 that as decreases while increases, the
teristic impedance, but also affects its couplings to the I/O trans- bandwidth will be enhanced greatly.
mission lines. Fig. 7(a) and (b) shows the physical models for Although the proposed configuration provides three re-
calculating coupling coefficients and in the equivalent flection zeros within the passband, the operating bandwidth
circuit of Fig. 3, respectively. of the physical model is limited by the U-shaped slot on the
Since at resonance the open-circuited quarter-wavelength ground plane. As mentioned above, it is difficult for a single
resonator is nearly short circuited at the point extending to discontinuity to control all the required couplings. Therefore, a
the U slotline resonator, in the model for calculating and modified structure, as shown in Fig. 9, is proposed for a better
, the microstrip line crossing-over the U slotline will be control of couplings so that the bandwidth can be increased
short-circuited to ground, as shown in Fig. 7(a). It can be seen as broad as possible. It is noted that two stepped discontinu-
from Fig. 7 that when calculating the coupling or , the U ities are inserted between the I/O port and the open-circuited
slotline resonator must be detuned so that no energy is divided. quarter-wavelength resonator. In principle, having the high-
As the dominant factor for creating couplings and is the and low-impedance line section decreases the coupling that
discontinuity of the slotline that divides the microstrip line and controls the power into the open-circuited quarter-wavelength
quarter-wavelength open-circuited resonator, one only needs to resonators, while changing the width of slotline can increase the
consider a short section of the slotline without taking the whole coupling coefficient that directs the signal to the U-shaped
942 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 60, NO. 4, APRIL 2012

Fig. 10. Relation between the coupling coefficient and the width of slotline.

Fig. 8. Simulated responses of the circuit model with and as parameters.

Fig. 11. Relation between the coupling coefficient and the width of inserted
high-impedance line.
Fig. 9. Top view of the modified structure.

slotline resonator. Fig. 10 illustrates the relation between the

coupling coefficient and the width of slotline. Fig. 11 shows
the relation between the coupling and the width of the
high-impedance line. It is observed that the coupling can
be effectively reduced in this manner. On the other hand, the
low-impedance discontinuity, as it provides a positive electrical
length to the open-circuited quarter-wavelength resonator,
makes the modified structure of the transition more compact,
as compared to the original structure shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 12
Fig. 12. Resonant frequency versus the width of the low-impedance line of the
shows the variation of resonance frequencies of the open-cir- modified open-circuited quarter-wavelength resonator.
cuited quarter-wavelength resonator versus the width of the
low-impedance line. It can be seen that using the modified
structure can reduce the size of transition by about 18%. Thus, TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF THE TRANSITION DESIGN EXAMPLE
when determining the physical length of the resonator, this size
reduction effect needs to be taken into consideration. By the
way, during the determination of the coupling coefficients in
the physical model, the corresponding stepped-impedance lines
should be included in the EM model.

VI. EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION

By following the design procedure outlined in Section IV, one
can easily design a circuit model of a transition provided that the
characteristic impedances of each transmission-line resonator
are given. As an example, the design procedure of a vertical The final designed physical dimensions and the circuit model
microstrip-to-microstrip transition, as shown in Fig. 9, is em- parameters of the transition are summarized in Tables I and II,
ployed here, where a 50- microstrip line is used for both mi- respectively. Fig. 13 shows the simulated magnitudes of the
crostrip line and open-circuited quarter-wavelength resonator. -parameters of the transition by the equivalent-circuit model
The U-shaped slotline has a characteristic impedance of 127 and the EM designed model. The simulated results indicate
that is designed by the closed-form formulas given in [15]. that the transition has a more than 100% bandwidth for the
HUANG AND WU: BROADBAND AND VIALESS VERTICAL MICROSTRIP-TO-MICROSTRIP TRANSITION 943

TABLE II
COMPARISON OF THE DESIGNED AND THE
EXTRACTED-CIRCUIT MODEL PARAMETERS

Fig. 15. Measured and simulated magnitudes of the reflection coefficients of

the transition.

Fig. 13. Simulated results of the equivalent-circuit model and the EM model
of a microstrip-to-microstrip transition.

Fig. 16. Measured and simulated magnitudes of the transmission coeffiicients

of the transition prototype.

TABLE III
DIMENSIONS OF THE TRANSITION DESIGN EXAMPLE

Fig. 14. Photograph of the prototype of a microstrip-to-microstrip transition.

return loss of better than 15 dB across the band with respect In order to experimentally characterize the performance,
to the center frequency of 7.5 GHz. To verify the proposed a prototype of the designed transition is fabricated. The
circuit model and the design procedure, the final EM designed photograph of the prototype is shown in Fig. 14. The measure-
responses are curve fitted for extracting the corresponding ment is conducted by using an R&S ZVA67 vector network
circuit parameters according to the model proposed in Fig. 2. analyzer. Consequently, the measured and EM simulated
The extracted-circuit model parameters are also listed in magnitudes of the reflection and transmission coefficients are
Table II for comparative purpose. It is noted that agreement superimposed in Figs. 15 and 16, respectively. A very broad
between the designed and the extracted coupling coefficients is impedance-matching bandwidth of 3.1–11.56 GHz for a return
excellent. The discrepancy in the resonance frequencies of the loss less than 10 dB is achieved. The measured lowest insertion
quarter-wavelength resonators is caused by the parasitic effects loss at the frequency of 7 GHz is about 0.25 dB. The measured
of the open end of the resonator and the parasitic effect of the results have demonstrated the excellent performance of the
bends of the U-shaped resonator. This verification demonstrates proposed transition.
that proposed circuit model is fully competent for practical To show the wide bandwidth feature of the proposed transi-
engineering designs. tion, as listed in Table III, its electric properties are compared
944 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, VOL. 60, NO. 4, APRIL 2012

with those of some published representative microstrip-to-mi- [7] L. Zhu and K. Wu, “Ultra broadband vertical transition for multilayer
crostrip vertical vialess transitions in the similar frequency integrated circuits,” IEEE Microw. Guided Wave Lett., vol. 9, no. 11,
pp. 453–455, Nov. 1999.
band. It should be noted that the bandwidth of a transition [8] M. Abbosh, “Ultra wideband vertical microstrip-microstrip transition,”
largely depends on the specified return-loss requirement and IET Microw. Antennas Propag., vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 968–972, Oct. 2007.
that the insertion loss strongly depends on the material used. [9] M. Tran and T. Itoh, “Analysis of microstrip lines coupled through
an arbitrarily shaped aperture in a thick common ground plane,” in
IEEE MTT-S Int. Microw. Symp. Dig., Atlanta, GA, 1993, vol. 3, pp.
819–822.
VII. CONCLUSION [10] Lafond, M. Himdi, J. Daniel, and N. Haese-Rolland, “Mi-
crostrip/thick-slot/microstrip transitions in millimeter waves,”
A vialess, broadband, and vertical microstrip-to-microstrip Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 100–103, Jul. 2002.
transition using a U-shaped slot on their common ground plane [11] T. Swierczynski, D. McNamara, and M. Clenet, “Via-walled cavities
as vertical transitions in multilayer millimeter-wave circuits,” Electron.
has been presented in this paper. In contrast to conventional Lett., vol. 39, no. 25, pp. 1829–1831, Dec. 2003.
transition structures, the proposed transition provides three re- [12] Li, J. Cheng, and C. Lai, “Designs for broadband microstrip vertical
flection zeros in the passband with low insertion loss over a very transitions using cavity couplers,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech.,
vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 464–472, Jan. 2006.
broad bandwidth. The working mechanism of the transition is [13] J. S. Hong and M. J. Lancaster, Microstrip Filters for RF/Microwave
interpreted by the concept of a three-pole resonator filter. An Applications. New York: Wiley, 2001, sec. 8.4.
equivalent-circuit model of the transition is also developed as a [14] J. W. Bandler, R. M. Biernacki, S. H. Chen, R. H. Hemmers, and K.
Madsen, “Electromagnetic optimization exploiting aggressive space
coarse model for engineering design. Based on the equivalent mapping,” IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 43, no. Dec., pp.
circuit, design formula for the transition are also developed and 2874–2882, Dec. 1995.
demonstrated, with which the coupling coefficients can be de- [15] R. Garg, P. Bhartia, I. Bahl, and A. Ittipaboon, Microstrip Antenna De-
sign Handbook. Norwood, MA: Artech House, 2001, pp. 786–789.
termined by using group-delay information of two segregated
simple EM models. In the end, a prototype transition is EM de- Xiaobo Huang was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1983.
signed according to the proposed design equation and procedure He received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in elec-
and is fabricated to validate the proposed transition. It has been tronic and optical engineering from the Nanjing Uni-
versity of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China,
demonstrated that by following the design procedure, one can in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree
design a proposed broadband microstrip-to-microstrip transi- in electronic engineering from The Chinese Univer-
tion in a deterministic way; and that the EM designed responses sity of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, in 2011.
Since 2011, he has been a Research Engineer with
approach to the desired ones of the optimal circuit model very the China Research and Development Center, Comba
well. The EM simulated results indicate that a more than 100% Telecommunication Systems, Guangzhou, China,
bandwidth for the return loss of better than 15 dB across the where he is involved with LTE smart antennas. His
current research interests include passive microwave and millimeter-wave
band can be achieved. It can be foreseen that the proposed tran- circuits, antennas and filters for communication systems, and LTCC-based
sition is particularly useful for broadband applications in the modules for wireless communications.
millimeter-wave frequency band and is highly suitable for mul-
tilayer wafer-level integration technologies, where making vias
is difficult. Ke-Li Wu (M’90–SM’96–F’11) received the B.S.
and M.Eng. degrees from the Nanjing University of
Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 1982
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