Design and Fabrication of Additively Manufactured Hybrid Rigid-Flex RF Components

This paper presents a novel fabrication method that combines the advantages of fine-line lithography on flex substrate and 3-D printing to create practical RF components that can readily be folded. Photolithography and 3-D printing enable the fabrication of rigid-flex RF components, where 3-D printing is used to create thick rigid structures and photolithography is utilized to pattern the fine detailed conductor features on a flexible substrate. A coax-like structure is demonstrated as an example, and it is used to design a feed network to a foldable Vivaldi antenna array. This paper presents the detailed buildup of two-folded Vivaldi antenna arrays.