A Fully Integrated Conductive and Dielectric Additive Manufacturing Technology for Microwave Circuits and Antennas

A fully-integrated additive manufacturing (AM) approach for microwave devices is presented in this work. The applied AM technology can print the circuit models simultaneously with conductive and dielectric materials. Taking advantage of this one-stop 3D manufacturing technology, multilayer circuit board with vias or holes can be prototyped rapidly and precisely. The electrical properties of the dielectric ink material are measured up to 40 GHz using a quasi-optical cavity test system. To further demonstrate the merit of this technology, an infilled-ground transmission line, as well as a microstrip patch antenna, are designed and fabricated. For proof-of-concept, the return loss, gain and radiation patterns of the antenna are measured, which demonstrate a good agreement with the simulated results.