Stripline Design

This chapter presented the essentials of stripline design, concentrating on the concepts that are additional to those of the other planar transmission lines that have been studied. With a symmetrical stripline the signal-carrying strip is embedded in a dielectric between two ground planes and, ideally, the signal return current is carried equally by each of the ground planes. In an asymmetrical stripline, asymmetrical strips are generally packed as close together as possible since stripline is often chosen to obtain a compact circuit. In a suspended-substrate stripline, the strip is supported by a thin layer of dielectric thus almost eliminating dielectric loss and enabling high-Q planar microwave circuits to be realized. The chapter also discusses coupled striplines, and doubled-sided stripline. Stripline discontuities have the same form as in microstrip. The major differences between the mediums result in significant differences in the characterization of the stripline discontinuities.