Photonic Curing of mm-Wave Coplanar Waveguides for Conductor Loss Enhancement

Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques for high-frequency electronics have evolved in the past decade to not only offer similar performance as traditional manufacturing, but to offer unprecedented design freedom. One of the main challenges of AM of radio-frequency devices is the losses associated with the printed conductive layers. Recent studies have shown that pulsed laser can enhance the conductivity of the conductive inks. In this work, the photonic curing process, or PulseForgeOR, is applied to AM coplanar waveguides (CPW) to measure its effect on the high-frequency electric conductivity. Dissipative losses are reduced by 2.58 dB, from -4.74dB to -2.16dB, at 40 GHz over a 10 mm long line, after photonic curing, when compared to thermally cured samples.