The Buried-Groundplane Microstrip Transmission Line, a New Interconnect for Ultra-High Speed Electronics

As signal frequencies on monolithic integrated circuit chips (IC's) approach the 10-100 GHz range, the role of the interconnect between devices becomes extremely important. Dispersion and loss along the interconnect may cause higher speed devices to be unusable. We propose here a new type of interconnect, the buried-groundplane microstrip (BGMS) transmission line (Fig. 1), which has much less dispersion than standard microstrip.