STRIPLINE a planar type of transmission line that lends itself well to

microwave integrated circuitry, miniaturization, and

photolithographic fabrication.
The geometry of a stripline is shown in Figure 3.1.
Consist of a; (1) top ground plane, (2) bottom ground plane and (3)
a center conductor
W is the width of thin conducting strip (centered between two wide
conducting ground planes).
b is the distance of ground planes separation.
The region between the ground planes is filled with a dielectric.
Practically, the centered conductor is constructed of thickness b/2.

A sketch of the field lines for stripline is shown in Figure 3.22b.

With the voltage applied between the center strip
and the pair of ground planes, current flows down
the center strip and returns by means of the two
ground planes.
Photograph of a stripline circuit assembly (cover removed), showing
four quadrature
hybrids, open-circuit tuning stubs, and coaxial transitions

To avoid complicated special functions,simple

formulas have been developed by curve fitting to the exact solution.
The resulting formula for characteristic impedance is

It is seen from equation [3.4] and [3.5] that the

characteristic impedance decreases as the strip width W
increase.

Since stripline is a TEM line, the attenuation due to dielectric loss is

of the same form
as that for other TEM lines and is given in (3.30).

The attenuation due to conductor loss

can be found by the perturbation method or Wheelers incremental
inductance rule. An
approximate result is
We know that the fields of the TEM mode on stripline must satisfy
Laplaces equation,
(3.11), in the region between the two parallel plates. The idealized
stripline geometry of
Figure 3.22a extends to, which makes the analysis more difficult.
Because we suspect,
from the field line drawing of Figure 3.22b, that the field lines do not
extend very far away
from the center conductor, we can simplify the geometry by
truncating the plates beyond
some distance, say |x| > a/2, and placing metal walls on the sides.
Thus, the geometry we
will analyze is shown in Figure 3.24, where a is greater than b, so
that the fields around the center conductor are not perturbed by the
sidewalls.

which is seen to be a Fourier series in x for the surface charge

density, s , on the strip at
y = b/2. If we know the surface charge density we could easily find
the unknown constants,
An, and then the capacitance. We do not know the exact surface
charge density, but
we can make a good guess by approximating it as a constant over
the width of the strip,