Vertically Polarized Planar Transition for Hollow-Dielectric-Waveguide-Based 5G/6G High-Speed mm-Wave Interconnect

Abstract

Hollow dielectric waveguide (HDW) is a highly anticipated solution for extremely low-loss and high-speed millimeter-wave (mm-wave) interconnect. However, the method for endfire power transition from HDW to planar backplane systems is limited to horizontal polarization in the literature. That is, the potentially available capacity of the HDW within the other polarization is idle and wasted. In this letter, the first vertically polarized (V-pol), endfire transition from tubular HDW to the printed circuit board (PCB) is proposed. The experimental result shows that the minimum calibrated transition loss is only 0.48 dB. And a wideband transition can be designed to achieve a fractional bandwidth of 20%. And a maximum data rate of 34 Gb/s over the proposed 1-m interconnect is demonstrated with 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM). For the endless race of data rate in 5G/6G communication, this technique provides a new direction for a low-loss and high-speed HDW-based interconnect between planar backplane systems.