Compact and performing transmission lines for mm-wave circuits design in advanced CMOS technology

This work presents a comparative study of conventional and slow wave (SW) transmission lines implemented in an advanced 22-nm CMOS process. Both microstrip (MS) and coplanar waveguides (CPW) were analysed through simulations and measurements. A classical SW approach was used for the implementation of the SW CPWs while the SW effect was generated in the MS lines using bed of nails integrated in the CMOS process. As a proof of concept, the proposed SW MS approach was employed to design a new artificial quarter-wave TL section. The proposed configuration was created loading a meandered MS line with open ended S-MS stubs acting as discrete capacitive loads. Results show that the proposed methodology offers an attractive form factor and good performance.