Simple High-Performance Metal-Plating Procedure for Stereolithographically 3-D-Printed Waveguide Components

This letter presents a simple and cheap metal-plating procedure for plastic 3-D printed microwave components. The devices are built using a Stereolithographic printer and then metalized by a two-step process consisting in a silver-painted substrate followed by copper electrodeposition. The method achieves good adhesion of the metal to the plastic body and high conductivity. Resonators and X -band filters have been fabricated and tested, showing excellent performance in terms of dimensional accuracy and low loss, with quality factors better than 6500. The technique can be usefully employed for fast and cheap prototyping of microwave components at least up to the X -band.