10.5281/zenodo.896233
https://zenodo.org/records/896233
oai:zenodo.org:896233
James Campion
James Campion
KTH
Umer Shah
Umer Shah
KTH
Joachim Oberhammer
Joachim Oberhammer
KTH
Elliptical Alignment Holes Enabling Accurate Direct Assembly of Microchips to Standard Waveguide Flanges at sub-THz Frequencies - Dataset
Zenodo
2017
alginment
micromachining
waveguide flange
submillimeter-wave
calibration
2017-06-04
10.5281/zenodo.815940
10.5281/zenodo.896232
https://zenodo.org/communities/m3tera
https://zenodo.org/communities/eu
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International
Current waveguide flange standards do not allow for the accurate fitting of microchips, due to the large mechanical tolerances of the flange alignment pins and the brittle nature of Silicon, requiring greatly oversized alignment holes on the chip to fit worst-case fabrication tolerances, resulting in unacceptably large misalignment error for sub-THz frequencies. This paper presents, for the first time, a new method for directly aligning micromachined Silicon chips to standard, i.e. unmodified, waveguide flanges with alignment accuracy significantly better than the waveguide-flange fabrication tolerances, through the combination of a tightly-fitting circular and an elliptical alignment hole on the chip. A Monte Carlo analysis predicts the reduction of the mechanical assembly margin by a factor of 5.5 compared to conventional circular holes, reducing the potential chip misalignment from 46 μm to 8.5 μm for a probability of fitting of 99.5%. For experimental verification, micromachined waveguide chips using either conventional (oversized) circular or the proposed elliptical alignment holes were fabricated and measured. A reduction in the standard deviation of the reflection coefficient by a factor of up to 20 was experimentally observed from a total of 200 measurements with random chip placement, exceeding the
expectations from the Monte Carlo analysis. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first solution for highly accurate assembly
of micromachined waveguide chips to standard waveguide flanges, requiring no custom flanges or other tailor-made split blocks.
European Commission
10.13039/501100000780
644039
Micromachined terahertz systems -a new heterogeneous integration platform enabling the commercialization of the THz frequency spectrum