Pin-on-Substrate Gap Waveguide: An Extremely Low-Cost Realization of High-Performance Gap Waveguide Components

Considering the limitations of currently available technologies for the realization of microwave components and antennas, a trade off between different factors including the efficiency and fabrication cost is required. The main objective of this letter is to propose a novel method for the realization of gap waveguides (GWGs) that take advantage of conventional printed circuit board fabrication technology, thus are low cost and light weight. Moreover, by avoiding dielectric loss and minimizing conductive loss, the proposed GWGs benefit from a very low loss. To highlight potential applications, a high-performance slot-array antenna based on the proposed GWG is presented.