Groove Gap Waveguide Crossover for Butler Matrices and Beamforming in Millimeter-Wave Satellite Antenna Systems

This paper presents an innovative H-plane crossover based on groove gap-waveguide (GGW) technology for high-performance millimeter-wave (mm-wave) circuits. The design facilitates the development of key transmission components, such as Butler matrices (BMs) and beamforming feeding networks (BFNs), for multi-beam antenna systems operating in the V-band spectrum (40–50 GHz). The proposed crossover is built by cascading two identical 3-dB/90° hybrid couplers. Each coupler is designed with GGW unit-cells constructed from metallic pins spaced less than a quarter-wavelength apart. This configuration creates a wide stopband of 20–57 GHz, ensuring minimal signal interference and strong impedance matching. The coupler achieves 90° phase shift, 50 dB isolation, and low insertion loss of 0.02 dB at 45 GHz, with a fractional bandwidth of 22.22%. The crossover demonstrates excellent performance over the entire V-band, making it suitable for advanced antenna systems in satellite communications and space applications. The design reduces complexity, cost, and losses typically associated with 3D and multilayer crossover technologies, providing a compact and efficient solution for mm-wave networks.