Submitted To- Submitted By-

Mr. MAHENDRA YADAV Mr. VIKALP KULSHRESTHA

Lect. Of E. C. deptt. Roll no.- 0903EC061114

Index

➢ Introduction.
➢ Advantages and disadvantages of strip line
➢ Stripling Rule of Thumb
➢ Strip line equations
INTRODUCTION
Strip line, according to David Poser’s textbook "Microwave
Engineering" was invented at by R. Barrett in the 1950s. Airborne Instruments Labs (Long
Island New York, gone but spawned present day companies such as MITEQ) coined the
term "strip line", while others such as Sanders (Nashua, NH, now part of BAE) applied the
trade name "Tri-plate".
Stripling is a conductor sandwiched by dielectric between a pair of ground planes, much
like a coax cable would look after you ran it over with your small-manhood indicating SUV
(let's not go there...) In practice, strip line is usually made by etching circuitry on a
substrate that has a ground plane on the opposite face, then adding a second substrate
(which is metalized on only one surface) on top to achieve the second ground plane. Strip
line is most often a "soft-board" technology, but using low-temperature co-fired ceramics
(LTCC), ceramic strip line circuits are also possible.
All kinds of interesting circuits can be fabricated if a third layer of dielectric is added
along with a second interior metal layer, for example, a stack-up of 31 mil Duroid, then 5
mil Duroid, then 31 mil Duroid (Duroid is a trademark of the Rogers Corporation).
Transmission lines on either of the interior metal layers behave very nearly like "classic"
strip line, the slight asymmetry is not a problem. Excellent "broadside" couplers can be
made by running transmission lines parallel to each other on the two surfaces. We'll add
more about this later!
Other variants of the strip line are offset strip line and suspended air strip line (SAS).
For strip line and offset strip line, because all of the fields are constrained to the same
dielectric, the effective dielectric constant is equal to the relative dielectric constant of the
chosen dielectric material. For suspended strip line, you will have to calculate the effective
dielectric constant, but if it is "mostly air", the effective dielectric constant will be close to
1.
Advantages and disadvantages of stripline
Strip line is a TEM (transverse
electromagnetic) transmission line media, like coax. This means that it is non-dispersive,
and has no cutoff frequency. Whatever circuits you can make on micro strip (which is
quasi-TEM), you can do better using strip line, unless you run into fabrication or size
constraints. Strip line filters and couplers always offer better bandwidth than their
counterparts in micro strip.
Another advantage of strip line is that fantastic isolation between adjacent traces can be
achieved (as opposed to micro strip). The best isolation results when a picket-fence of visa
surrounds each transmission line, spaced at less than 1/4 wavelength. Strip line can be
used to route RF signals across each other quite easily when offset strip line is used.
Disadvantages of strip line are two: first, it is much harder (and more expensive) to
fabricate than micro strip. Lumped-element and active components either have to be buried
between the ground planes (generally a tricky proposition), or transitions to micro strip
must be employed as needed to get the components onto the top of the board.
The second disadvantage of strip line is that because of the second ground plane, the strip
widths are much narrower for a given impedance (such as 50 ohms) and board thickness
than for micro strip. A common reaction to problems with micro strip circuits is to attempt
to convert them to strip line. Chances are you'll end up with a board thickness that is four
times that of your micro strip board to get equivalent transmission line loss. That means
you'll need forty mils thick strip line to replace ten mil thick micro strip! This is one of the
reasons that soft-board manufacturers offer so many thicknesses.

Stripline Rule of Thumb

Time for another Microwaves101 Rule of Thumb! This one was contributed by an
Yaroslav, from beautiful Butler, New Jersey. The minimum width for a stripline that is
encased by metal on the edges is 5 times the line width, in order for the impedance to
calculate with the "normal" closed form equations.
The drawing below is a 3D electromagnetic model of stripline with perfect electrical
conductors encasing all four sides along the z and y axes (created using Ansoft's HFSS).
The width of the stripline is 0.284 inches, its thickness is 0.050 inches, the height of the
enclosure is 0.750 inches, and the relative dielectric constant of the material is 1 (it's air).

The width of the enclosure was varied to examine its effect on characteristic impedance
(see figure below). As the width increases, the impedance increases (less fringing
capacitance to the edge walls), but the rate of increase eventually reduces to zero when the
enclosure becomes infinitely wide (the enclosure becomes two parallel plates). The goal of
this design was to determine the dimensions for a 100 ohm transmission line, which
happens to occur near a width of 1.4 inches. Coincidentally, the 5X width rule is 1.42
inches. Past the 5X width point, the impedance only changes about 2% all the way out to
infinity. An error of two percent in impedance is so small it is usually negligible. After all,
it represents a voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of only 1.02:1!
For grins we tried the Microwaves101 strip line impedance calculator on Yaroslav's
dimensions of 0.750 inch height, and 0.284 inch strip width. We calculated 114 ohms.
Looks like our calculator wasn't all that accurate in this case, but we will look into this
further.
Strip line equations
A simplified equation for characteristic impedance of strip line is given as:
We seem to have misplaced the reference for this equation, any strip line solution comes
with a lot of caveats about what range of geometries it performs accurately. We'll try to dig
that up shortly.