Slow-Wave Effect of Substrate Integrated Waveguide Patterned With Microstrip Polyline

A class of slow-wave substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) structures patterned with microstrip polyline is presented, theoretically studied, and experimentally validated, which demonstrates some interesting slow-wave propagation effects. The slow-wave SIW (SW-SIW) enables the size reduction of a physically large circuit without sacrificing its performance. A size reduction of 40% of the lateral dimension is achieved with reference to that of the conventional SIW counterpart at the same cutoff frequency. Meanwhile, the phase velocity of the waveguide is also reduced by 40%, resulting in a smaller longitudinal dimension for a given electrical length. Both lateral and longitudinal effects give rise to a total size reduction, largely extending the operation range of SIW structures in the low-frequency region, which has often been restrained by a physical dimension-related cutoff frequency. Also, a transmission line-based two-dimensional (2-D) equivalent-circuit model is proposed and deployed for the modeling and analysis of the slow-wave mechanism. The results from the equivalent-circuit model agrees very well with that from the full-wave simulations. Furthermore, a broadband microstrip to SW-SIW taper with good return loss is designed for measurement verification. Using the proposed SW-SIW structure, the size of conventional SIW-based microwave circuits such as power splitters, couplers, and filters can be further reduced in addition to the existing size-reduction techniques.