Vertical Microstrip-Microstrip Transition for Ultra Wideband Applications

The design of an ultra wideband aperture-coupled vertical microstrip-microstrip transition is presented. The proposed transition exploits broadside coupling between exponentially tapered microstrip patches at the top and bottom layers via an exponentially tapered slot at the mid layer. The theoretical analysis indicates that the best performance concerning the insertion loss and the return loss over the maximum possible bandwidth can be achieved when the coupling factor is equal to 0.75 (or 2.5 dB). The calculated and simulated results show that the proposed transition has a linear phase performance, an important factor for distortionless pulse operation, with less than 0.4 dB insertion loss and more than 17 dB return loss across the frequency band 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz.