Wire transmission lines

Updated October 28, 2006

New for November 2006! This is going to seem hodgepodge for a while until we get going. For now we will dump whatever info we can that has to do with wires used as transmission lines onto this page, then sort it out later.

Wire over ground

We have a calculator that calculates impedance for this structure, click here!

Twin wires

Twisted pair

Resistive loss of a wirebond

We modified the coax spreadsheet (available in the download area) to calculate the metal loss of 1-mil diameter bond over frequency (does not include mismatch loss or radiation). It is very low, the plot is in dB/mm, a typical X-band bond is 1mm. The calculation also shows that at DC, 1-mil gold wire has 20 ohms resistance/meter, which
goes up with frequency.

The loss might actually be lower if you took into account that the impedance is transformed by the bondpads to something less than fifty ohms.