15. J.H. Chou and S.W. Su, Matching a Bluetooth headset antenna on a small system ground by using a conductive wire, Microwave Opt Technol Lett 51 (2009), 2802–2805. 16. Ansoft Corporation HFSS, Available at: http://www.ansoft.com/ products/hf/hfss. 17. CTIA authorized test laboratory, CTIA, the wireless association, Available at: http://www.ctia.org/business_resources/certification/tes- t_labs/. 18. Test Plan for Mobile Station over the Air Performance, Rev. No. 2.22, 2008, Available at: http://files.ctia.org/pdf/CTIA_TestPlafor- MobileStationOTA PerformanceRevision_2_2_2_Final_121808.pdf. 19. J.L. Volakis, Antenna engineering handbook, 4th ed. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2007; Chapter 6, pp. 16–19. V C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. GIGABYTE AND TERABYTE PER SECOND CONNECTIONS WITH SEMICONDUCTOR WAVEGUIDE TECHNOLOGY Vanessa P. R. Magri, 1 Rodolfo A. A. Lima, 2 and Marbey M. Mosso 1 1 Centro de Estudos em Telecomunicaco ˜ es, Pontifı ´cia Universidade Cat olica do Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio, Rua Marque ˆ s de Sa ˜o Vicente, 225 CEP 22453-900, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil; Corresponding author: marbey@cetuc.puc-rio.br 2 Grupo de Guerra Eletro ˆ nica, IPqM Instituto de Pesquisas da Marinha, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil Received 4 January 2012 ABSTRACT: This work presents the research, design, and development of guided-wave connections in SiGe semiconductor substrates. The integration of digital systems using semiconductor integrated waveguides (S-SIWG) with QAM modulation formats are highlighted for ultrafast inter-chip and intra-chip connections at 100 Gbit/s extended to the Terahertz domain. The simulations of the frequency response for the prototype model with coaxial probe excitations in the frequency range 50–150 GHz are evaluated, showing far than satisfactory performance. The S-SIWG is then simulated in the 0.5–1.5 THz bandwidth, presenting excellent insertion loss. A SiGe S-SIWG prototype was fabricated and tested at 15–60 GHz. V C 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:2438–2444, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27060 Key words: semiconductor substrate integrated waveguide; SiGe; high- speed printed circuit board; integrated circuits; electronic circuits 1. INTRODUCTION High performance computing and new network applications are driving bandwidth (BW) requirements to the Terahertz domain. Processor-to-memory interfaces and multiprocessor systems are increasing chip-to-chip input/output demands. Projections esti- mate that CPU-to memory interconnections will generate BW requirements from 10 Gigabytes up to 1 Terabyte per second [1]. Optical interconnections are being developed due to their fre- quency and length independent behavior and cross-talk immunity. However, as polymer and silicon nitride optical waveguide substrates differ from laser and photodetector materials, mono- lithic integration is still complex and expensive. Planar line interconnections, using microstrip, stripline, CPW, or slotline configurations, have been used in circuit boards, MIC, MMIC over GaAs and also in CMOS, SiCMOS, SiGeCMOS substrates, on-chip and off-chip. Since all planar lines interconnections are responsible to high attenuation, cross-talk and delays, operations above 50 GHz is limited. In this work, a new SiGe semiconductor waveguide configu- ration associated to QAM modulation formats is proposed to overcome microstrip planar line impairments and replace planar lines interconnections. Section II introduces the semiconductor substrate waveguide (S-SIWG) concept and formulates the waveguide properties to obtain wideband propagation in the Terahertz domain with 100 GHz BW. Additionally, section 2 also presents an input configuration to achieve waveguide sin- glemode excitation. Besides, the loss characteristics of S-SIWG are compared with those of microstrip planar lines. In section 3, the S-SIWG is associated with QAM digital modulation and fre- quency translation techniques to achieve terabyte digital inter- connections avoiding the need for bus parallelism. In section 4, experimental results are presented and compared with simula- tions. Finally, section 5 presents comments and conclusions. 2. SEMICONDUCTOR WAVEGUIDES The substrate integrated waveguide (SIWG) configurations oper- ating in microwave and millimeter wave frequency are generally fabricated over ceramic or soft substrate [2]. Their guided-wave properties on a single substrate provide an interesting dielectric waveguide alternative to rectangular waveguides (RWGs) [3, 4]. The use of waveguides on SiGe is an alternative interconnection technology able to operate in the Terahertz domain. The semi- conductor waveguide (S-SIWG) configuration consists of a dielectric substrate whose boundaries in both sides are walls per- formed by parallel arrays of metalized via-holes [3]. This struc- ture can be related to a dielectric RWG. Figure 1 illustrates (a) a three-dimensional (3D) view of a semiconductor SIWG and (b) its semiconductor RWG equivalent model. Figure 1 Comparison of waveguide types: (a) S-SIWG; (b) equivalent dielectric RWG. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com] 2438 MICROWAVE AND OPTICAL TECHNOLOGY LETTERS / Vol. 54, No. 10, October 2012 DOI 10.1002/mop