Resistors and Terminations

Click here to go to our main page on lumped elements

Click here to go to our main page on skin depth

If you can't understand why these resistors might not work so well at 40 GHz, perhaps it's time to choose a new career... BTW, we get spammed with photos of stuff like this all the time, someone in China must think that Microwaves101 is in the business of manufacturing obsolete consumer electronics...

So far we have four pages on the topics of resistors and terminations, but we've only scratched the surface!

Here is a clickable index to our material on resistors:

Embedded resistors (new for July 2021)

Resistors for microwave frequencies (this page)

Thick film resistors

Thick-film fabrication process

Thick-fim chip resistors

Resistor power rating

Thin film resistors

Temperature stabilization

Trimming and tolerancing

Waveguide terminations (coming soon, or not)

Resistor mathematics

Ohm's law

Sheet resistance

Resistor derating

Resistance temperature coefficient

Mesa resistors

Resistors for microwave frequencies

What's so special about microwave resistors? Axial-leaded resistors, the ones with the color-coded rings that you might be familiar with from misspent youth of busting stuff to "see how it works", are not going to work at microwave frequencies. This is because you have to consider that anything with dimensions longer than perhaps a sixteenth wavelength acts as distributed element. It is desirable for a resistor to behave like a lumped element in most microwave applications.

The problem that resistors have at microwave frequencies is that in order to be considered a lumped element, they must be physically small, but they must also be sized in order to dissipate power.