Silicon Micromachined D-Band Diplexer Using Releasable Filling Structure Technique

A D-band waveguide diplexer, implemented by silicon micromachining using releasable filling structure (RFS) technique to obtain high-precision geometries, is presented here for the first time. Prototype devices using this RFS technique are compared with devices using the conventional microfabrication process. The RFS technique allows etching large waveguide structures with nearly 90° sidewall angles for the 400- $\mu \text{m}$ -tall waveguides. The diplexer consists of two direct-coupled cavity six-pole bandpass filters, with the lower and the upper band at 130–134 and 141–148.5 GHz, respectively. The measured insertion loss of the two bands is 1.2 and 0.8 dB, respectively, and the measured return loss is 20 and 18 dB, respectively, across 85% of the passbands. The worst case adjacent channel rejection is better than 59 dB. The unloaded quality factors of a single cavity resonator are estimated from the measurements to reach 1400. Furthermore, for the RFS-based micromachined diplexer, an excellent agreement between measured and simulated data was observed, with a center frequency shift of only 0.8% and a bandwidth deviation of only 8%. In contrast to that, for the conventionally micromachined diplexer of this high complexity, the filter poles are not well controllable, resulting in a large center frequency shift of 3.5%, a huge bandwidth expanding of over 60%, a poor return loss of 6 and 10 dB for the lower and the upper band, respectively, and an adjacent channel rejection of only 22 dB.