Aerosol Jet 3D-Printed Compact EBG Resonators

In this work, we demonstrate the realization of fully additively manufactured microwave and millimeter-wave (mm-wave) electromagnetic-bandgap (EBG) structures including the fabrication of both the dielectric substrate and conductive paths. We design, fabricate, and characterize three types of loaded EBG resonators in the Ka-, V-, and W-band, respectively. We use the aerosol jet printing (AJP) technology, utilizing both conductive and nonconductive inks. The compact EBG resonant unit cells are incorporated into finite ground coplanar transmission lines. We achieve a minimum feature size of 30 μm and resonator conductive path areas of 0.4 mm
²
. We perform measurements from 50 MHz up to 110 GHz, and we find that the measured performance correlates well with simulations. Our results show that small and compact resonant and filtering structures for EBG applications in highly integrated microwave and mm-wave circuits can be fully and reliably realized via AJP.