Substrate Integrated Waveguide
Substrate Integrated Waveguide
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Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) is an new form of transmission line that has been popularized in the past few years by some
researchers. New transmission lines only come along once in a lifetime, so pay attention, this is a big deal!
SIW is shown in the HFSS model above. A rectangular guide is created within a substrate (usually a soft board) by adding a top
metal over the ground plane and caging the structure with rows of plated vias on either side. To an EM wave, if everything works
out, it looks like a dielectrically-filled rectangular waveguide, with reduced height compared to the "normal" 2:1 width:height
ratio. Reduced height is no big deal, it just reduces the impedance the wave sees (increases capacitance/length).
One attraction to SIW is that the amount of metal that carries the signal is far greater than it would be in microstrip or stripline.
Therefore conductor loss αC is lower.
One potential disadvantage if SIW is that leakage losses can be substantial. This is related to how tight the vias are spaced. This
means that αR is a non-zero term.
Another disadvantage is that by introducing a dielectric into the guide (compared to air in "normal" rectangular waveguide) you
now have introduced dielectric losses αD . This term is proportional to frequency, so the application of SIW at millimeter-wave
needs to look at this term carefully. Chances are that losses due to conductivity of the substrate αG will be close to zero if you
chose a good substrate. If you try this trick on high-resistivity silicon, let us know how much you lose due to conduction!
Update November 2010! This new material came from Sinan, a Masters student at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Thank you,
sir!
1. Introduction
In high frequency applications, microstrip devices are not efficient, and because wavelength at high frequencies are small,
microstrip device manufacturing requires very tight tolerances. At high frequencies waveguide devices are preferred; however
their manufacturing process is difficult. Therefore a new concept emerged: substrate integrated waveguide. SIW is a transition
between microstrip and dielectric-filled waveguide (DFW). Dielectric filled waveguide is converted to substrate integrated
waveguide (SIW) by the help of vias for the side walls of the waveguide.
Figure 1: (a) Air filled waveguide, (b) dielectric filled waveguide, (c) substrate integrated waveguide
Because there are vias at the sidewalls, transverse magnetic (TM) modes do not exist; TE10 therefore is the dominant mode. There
are many articles for designing substrate integrated waveguides, however there are missing parts in many of them, they just give
the known equations but they do not carefully investigate those equations. In this report, the tolerances of the published SIW
design equations are inspected.
For a rectangular waveguide, cut off frequency of arbitrary mode is found by the following formula:
(1)
where:
c: speed of light
m, n: mode numbers
a, b: dimensions of the waveguide
(2)
For DFW with same cut off frequency, dimension "ad" is found by:
(3)
Having determined the dimension "a" for the DFW, we can now pass to the design equations for SIW.
(4)
where
d: diameter of the via
p: pitch (distance between the vias)
In published articles about SIW design, the following two conditions are required [1]
(5)
(6)
Where (guided wavelength) is: [2]
(7)
Ka band is used at 26.5-40 GHz and for the maximum case (40 GHz), we investigated the results. At 40 GHz, = 179 mil, therefore
maximum d is 35.8 mils. Diameter sweep results of CST are shown in Figure 6 and pitch sweep results are in Figure 7.
4. Conclusion
As seen from Figure 6, when the diameter increases, the bandwidth narrows from the higher frequency side. The result for d=50
mil can be inspected in this figure.
As seen from Figure 7, when the pitch increases, the bandwidth narrows from the higher frequency side and for higher values of p,
the response is distorted. The responses for p=60 and 80 should be inspected.
When we investigated the results of Figures 6 and 7, it is clear that these design equations work well, however they are not
obligatory for designing SIW. They can be used as initial design equations and after the first design they can be optimized if the
frequency range to be used is different. These equations are necessary for finding the equivalent waveguide.
5. References
[1] K. Wu, D. Deslandes and Y. Cassivi, "The Substrate Integrated Circuits - A New Concept for High-Frequency Electronics and
Optoelectronics," TELSKIS 2003, Nis, Serbia and Montenegro, pp. Oct. 2003.
[2] J. E. Rayas-Sanchez and V. Gutierrez-Ayala, "A General EM-Based Design Procedure for Single-Layer Substrate Integrated
Waveguide Interconnects with Microstrip Transitions", IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp. Dig., Atlanta, GA, Jun. 2008, pp. 983-986.
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