THz and mm-wave technology has become increasingly significant in a very diverse range of applications such as spectroscopy, imaging, and communication as a consequence of a plethora of significant advances in this field. However to achieve a mass production of THz systems, all the commercial aspects should be considered. The main concerns are attributed to the robustness, compactness, and a low cost device. In this regard, research efforts should be focused on the elimination of obstacles standing in the way of commercializing the THz technology.
To this end, in this study, low cost fabrication technologies for various parts of mm-wave/THz systems are investigated and explored to realize compact, integrated, and rugged components. This task is divided into four phases. In the first phase, a robust fiber-based beam delivery configuration is deployed instead of the free beam optics which is essential to operate the low cost THz photomixers and photoconductive antennas. The compensation of different effects on propagation of the optical pulse along the optical fiber is achieved through all-fiber system to eliminate any bulky and unstable optical components from the system. THz measurements on fiber-coupled systems exhibit the same performance and even better compared to the free beam system. In the next phase, the generated THz wave is coupled to a rectangular dielectric waveguide through design of a novel transition with low insertion loss. The structure dimensions are reported for various range of frequencies up to 650GHz with insertion loss less than 1dB. The structure is fabricated through a standard recipe. In third phase, as consequence of the advent of high performance active device at mm-wave and THz frequency, a transition is proposed for coupling the electromagnetic wave to the active devices with CPW ports. Different approaches are devised for different frequencies as at higher frequencies any kind of metallic structure can introduce a considerable amount of loss to the system. The optimized structures show minimum insertion loss as low as 1dB and operate over 10% bandwidth. The various configurations are fabricated for lower frequencies to verify the transition performance. The last phase focuses on the design, optimization, fabrication and measurements of a new dielectric side-grating antenna for frequency scanning applications. The radiation mechanism is extensively studied using two different commercial full-wave solvers as well as the measured data from the fabricated samples. The optimized antenna achieves a radiation efficiency of 90% and a gain of 18dB. The measured return loss and radiation pattern show a good agreement with the simulation results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:WATERLOO/oai:uwspace.uwaterloo.ca:10012/7157 |
| Date | 12 December 2012 |
| Creators | Zandieh, Alireza |
| Source Sets | University of Waterloo Electronic Theses Repository |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
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