Emerging Substrate Integrated Circuits and Systems

Prof. Kaixue Ma
Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Abstract: Microwave and mm-wave circuits and systems are widely used in modern communications such as 5G, satellite, radars used in space, ground and automobile and sensors for positioning and measurement. It is the most significant trend to make these circuits and systems low cost, small size, light weight and high performance. The properties of transmission line, such as losses, size, etc., play vital roles of platform for these circuits and systems. Guided wave transmission lines such as waveguide and suspended waveguide have the features of low loss, weak dispersion, high power capacity etc. However, metal housing is necessary to form air cavities, which provides mechanical support and shielding while leads to large size, heavy weight, precise mechanic fabrication and assembling lead to additional manufacturing cost. In this talk, the substrate integrated technology like substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) and substrate integrated suspended line (SISL) technology will be introduced. The talk will mainly focus on our proposed SISL, which forms an excellent integration design platform for devices, passive and active circuits into a RF front-end sub-system or system. The proposed SISL technology with advantages of self-packaging, light weight, low loss etc. has been used to design series of novel passive, active circuits as well as system like filter, coupler, balun, VCO, mixer, low noise amplifier (LNA), power amplifier (PA), butler matrix, antenna array and six-port receiver etc. The proposed SISL almost keeps all the merits of the waveguide circuits while overcomes its drawbacks. Numerous excellent results of these innovative designs have demonstrated the advantages of low loss, low cost, high integration density and self-packaging of the SISL technology, which can be expected to become one excellent design and 3D integration technology for the next generation of microwave and mm-wave circuits and systems.

Speaker’s Bio: Kaixue Ma is the Professor and Dean of the School of Microelectronics in Tianjin University. He received Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He worked in industry for 10 years including Chinese Academy of Space Technology and ST Electronics etc. He was with NTU and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China for many years. Dr. Ma proposed a variety of new microwave integrated circuits based on advanced CMOS, SiGe BiCMOS, GaAs and SOI technologies, and a new circuit and system design technology of SISL. He is currently working on GaAs and silicon-based millimeter-wave and sub-millimeter-wave integrated circuits. He authored/co-authored two books, 40 patents and over 280 referable papers in the fields of microwave, millimeter-wave and THz integrated circuits and systems. Dr. Ma is awardee of the Chinese National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. He received 10 technique awards including best paper award etc. He was Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques and Guest Editor of IEEE Microwave Magazine. He is Fellow of Chinese Institute of Electronics, current Member and Speakers Bureau of MTT-4 and IEEE MTT-S R10 Coordinator for China and Singapore.