A SIMPLIFIED IMPLEMENTATION OF SUBSTRATE INTEGRATED NON-RADIATIVE DIELECTRIC WAVEGUIDE AT MILLIMETER-WAVE FREQUENCIES

Abstract

The substrate integrated non-radiative dielectric (SINRD) guide presents a rather complicated process of design and implementation because of multiple interrelated design parameters involved in the definition of structures. In this work, the size of SINRD guide is halved by using a perfect electrical conductor (PEC) image plane. Consequently, the number of modes in the resulting image SINRD (iSINRD) guide is equally reduced since all even modes including the LSE10 mode are suppressed. Furthermore, a simple yet accurate design method is proposed that takes into account many parameters involved in the design of an SINRD guide, especially dimensions of perforation and dispersion effects.Three iSINRD prototypes are fabricated to test the proposed method over the W- band frequency range. Two of the prototypes are based on Alumina substrate with different perforation profiles, and both exhibit insertion loss around 1 dB while the return loss is around 16 dB. The third is based on RO6002 substrate and exhibits an insertion loss of around 3 dB and a return loss of around 14 dB. To test the leakage loss caused by periodic gaps in the PEC wall, two iSINRD lines with one and three gaps were fabricated. The insertion and return losses of the former case are respectively 1.2 dB and 17 dB compared to 2.5 dB and 18 dB of the latter case.