Abstract
During the last few years, the use of hybrid integrated circuits in microwave radio links has increased significantly. This paper reports on a range of microwave hybrid circuits now in production at our plant. These include transistor high power amplifiers, low noise mixers and various other circuits. The hybrid technology has proven to be cost competitive with the more conventional waveguide and coaxial technologies, and gives quite a few other advantages as well. Among these, the standardization of packages and modules is discussed in some detail. The trend is now to use the hybrid technology in VHF circuits as well. This opens up the possibility of integrating related functions in one package. The production cost in this case must be related to printed circuit boards, and it remains to be seen if there is anything to gain in this respect. However the reduction of the size of modules and the time for circuit alignment will certainly give an improvement in the overall system cost. In order to reduce the cost of microwave hybrid circuits, thick film technology is currently being investigated for use up to 15 GHz. There is probably no specific upper frequency for thick film circuits, but the possibility of using conventional thick film technology depends on the actual circuits under consideration. Preliminary results of this work are reported, together with a cost comparison between thick film and thin film microwave hybrid circuits.