Novel Hollow Substrate Integrated Waveguide for 5G and Robotic Applications

This paper presents, a novel design of a Hollow Substrate Integrated Waveguide (HSIW), that is built by using both Subtractive and Additive Manufacturing technologies. Specifically, it utilizes Polymer jetting method to print an Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) dielectric substrate and a water laser cutter system to produce smooth copper sheets as the top and bottom enclosures of the HSIW. Also, the fabrication process is utilizing mechanical through hole plating of commercially available prefabricated vias, eliminating the cost and complexity of performing vias fabrication and metallization process as in other SIW designs. The proposed waveguide covers 5G new radio frequency bands, specifically from 21 GHz to 31 GHz. It has a simulated and a measured attenuation constant of 0.636 Np/m and 1.56 Np/m respectively, for the whole operating frequency range and is among the lowest reported values to date. The proposed HSIW of this paper, can be compared with other state- of-the-art designs in terms of compactness, manufacturing cost and performance. The designed HSIW can be integrated with other planar circuits and can be used to build functional devices such as antennas or filters for 5G, robotics and IoT applications.