Low Loss Gap Waveguide Transmission line and Transitions at 220-320 GHz Using Dry Film Micromachining
Journal article, 2021

This paper presents a novel microfabrication technique to manufacture gap waveguide components operating at sub-millimeter wave (sub-mmWave) frequency range. The conventional metal waveguide component manufacturing has a low resolution and low throughput and is not suitable for applications above 100 GHz. The micromachining techniques have matured and applied in various applications. Several micromachining techniques have been developed to address the specification requirements of different fields. Conventional micromachining techniques suffer from fabrication issues such as non-vertical sidewall, non-uniform surface, and time-consuming fabrication process. The proposed dry film photoresist offers significant amount of benefits such as fewer processing steps, reduced production cost, shorter prototyping time over existing micromachine techniques. To validate the proposed fabrication method, SUEX dry film photoresist is used to demonstrate three gap waveguide transmission lines. Different transitions from rectangular waveguide (RW) to gap waveguide (GW) have also been designed to characterize the newly fabricated gap waveguide components with a standard measurement setup. All the designed and fabricated device operates from 220 GHz to 320 GHz. The fabricated devices showed a good agreement with the simulation result over this frequency band and the measured average insertion losses were in the order of 0.048 dB/mm and 0.075 dB/mm for groove gap waveguide and ridge gap waveguide respectively. Thus, dry film photoresist provides fabrication precision of the structures and consequently opens the path for low-cost fabrication of high-frequency waveguide components.

Dry film photoresist

Manufacturing

Pins

rectangular waveguide

Resists

gap waveguide technology

waveguide transition

Waveguide components

Gap waveguide

Rectangular waveguides

microfabrication

sub-mmWave

Waveguide transitions

Author

Sadia Farjana

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Electronics Material and Systems

Mohammadamir Ghaderi

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Electronics Material and Systems

Ashraf Uz Zaman

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Sofia Rahiminejad

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Per Lundgren

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Electronics Material and Systems

Peter Enoksson

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Electronics Material and Systems

IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology

2156-3950 (ISSN) 21563985 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 11 2012-2021

Subject Categories

Textile, Rubber and Polymeric Materials

Other Materials Engineering

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/TCPMT.2021.3111137

More information

Latest update

5/1/2023 1