Yield‐oriented design protocol and equivalent circuit model for W‐band E‐plane waveguide‐to‐microstrip transitions

This work presents a comprehensive design protocol for a W‐band E‐plane waveguide‐to‐microstrip transition covering all aspects, from the probe design, matching, cut‐off cavity size estimations, verification analysis with different 3D EM simulators, and the entire fabrication process, with special emphasis on tolerances and yield with optimized costs. In fact, a complete study of the manufacture yield is done without the need to fabricate a large number of units of the microstrip‐to‐waveguide transition by taking advantage of the Monte Carlo tools embedded in 3D EM simulators. A simple equivalent circuit model of the transition is proposed and validated to be used in W‐band system level simulations. These are requirements to enable massive use of W‐band products (i.e., concealed weapons detection, imaging, etc.) with reasonable costs. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:77–91, 2014.