Electrodynamic analysis of combined microstrip and coplanar/slotline structures with 3-D components based on a surface/volume integral-equation approach

This paper deals with the electrodynamic analysis of structures embedded in multilayered media, which consist of both microstrip/stripline and coplana r/slotline components also comprising three-dimensional components like ver tical interconnects, finite dielectric fillings, or coatings. The analysis is based on a surface/volume integral-equation method using a magnetic surf ace current description for the slot areas, electric surface currents for t he planar microstrip/stripline structures, and electric or polarization vol ume currents for the description of vertical interconnects and finite diele ctric regions. The current discretization is performed by rectangular subdo main basis functions with asymmetric segmentations and corresponding volume current functions on arbitrary nonuniform meshes, For the effective and ac curate evaluation of the system matrix, me apply a general asymptotic subtr action technique combined with complete analytical solutions of all dominan t asymptotic system matrix entries. Furthermore, we use adaptive database t echniques employed to the remaining numerical integrations and identity sea rch algorithms for an optimized redundancy reduction, The method was applie d to a large class of different structures comprising customary microstrip components, coplanar bandstop filters, and metal-insulation-metal capacitan ces and a new class of submillimeter-wave receivers, The results are in goo d agreement with experimental data or with results of finite-difference app roaches, where, however, the latter require much more computational and sto rage effort.