Investigation of Fabrication Accuracy and Repeatability of High-$Q$ Silicon-Micromachined Narrowband Sub-THz Waveguide Filters

Abstract

This paper investigates the fabrication accuracy and repeatability of micromachined quadruplet filters designed at a center frequency of 270 GHz with a 5-GHz bandwidth using a versatile multilayer chip platform which allows for axially arranged waveguide ports. A large number of narrowband silicon-micromachined filters arranged on multiple chips are investigated for fabrication imperfections, assembly misalignment, and fabrication yield, employing fabrication-prediction and different chip-to-chip self-alignment feature strategies. A numerical technique for characterization of the entire fabrication process of the filters through extracting the error statistics for coupling coefficients of a large number of different samples from separately assembled chips is proposed. A total of 47 test filters in effectively 15 different design variants have been fabricated in two fabrication runs, evaluated, and analyzed. The most critical sources of errors are determined. The expected accuracy of the entire filters fabrication process is demonstrated through the yield analysis based on the collected error statistics.