Slow Wave Gap Waveguide With Bandpass Filtering Functionality

Abstract

Gap waveguide (GW) technology, taking advantage of contactless electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures, solves the contact issue of conventional rectangular waveguides and provides a reliable method for packaging with planar circuits. Herein, a slow wave GW (SW-GW) structure with bandpass filtering functionality is presented. Utilizing the low-frequency cutoff characteristic of the GW and band-stop effect of the quasi-periodic transverse corrugations inside the GW, the lower and upper stopbands of the SW-GW can be easily achieved and reconfigured for different bandwidth requirements. The relationship between the dispersion diagram and the filtering characteristics, including the pass and stop bandwidths and group delay (GD), is studied to provide a simple but effective design guideline. The presented SW-GW reduces the design and implementation difficulties of conventional filters, especially wideband filters. A prototype operating at 24–30 GHz is designed and manufactured to validate the idea, and a good agreement is achieved between the measurement and simulation results.