Integrated left- and right-handed passive structures for millimeter wave applications

This paper presents the design of different on-chip left- and right-handed transmission lines for millimeter application and based on lumped components, such as inductors and capacitors. Further, the utilization of the developed models in a Wilkinson combiner structures is investigated. An easy and straightforward procedure has also been presented to ease the inductor and capacitor value selection. All the structures are designed and realized on IHP 0.25 μm SiGe BiCMOS process. The results, extracted from the measurements, show a good agreement with the simulation. Moreover it verifies the utilization feasibility of this design technique in realization of the on-chip passive structures, such as combiners and matching networks, with minimum size and low loss. The achieved results show good matching and less than 1 dB insertion loss with more than 10 times active chip size reduction, for λ/4 line and Wilkinson combiner, by using this technique.