Towards the development of terahertz substrate integrated circuit technology

This paper begins with an overview of the state-of-the-art of substrate integrated circuits (SICs) that have been under intensive research and development since more than one decade. The attractiveness and popularity of this emerging technological platform now become more and more apparent for microwave and millimeter-wave system design as well as microwave photonic applications. Thanks to the current processing technology advancement such as enabling TSV 3-D Silicon techniques and material research progress such as nanostructured and subwavelength plasmonics, the underlying features and advantages of SICs allow us to anticipate and extrapolate their application trends towards higher end of frequency spectrum, that is, terahertz frequency range where no tangible integrated circuits technology is available to date. Interestingly, SICs may find itself as the next generation of high-frequency integrated circuits on the basis of their historical development path starting from the hollow rectangular waveguide. Challenging issues and future directions are discussed for terahertz applications, pointing to a potentially cost-effective and performance-promising ICs solution for mass commercial applications.