Cost-Effective Implementation of Air-Filled Waveguides on Printed Circuit Boards

This paper presents a new cost-effective method to produce air-filled waveguides out of a printed circuit board (PCB) with a milling machine and how to implement them with standard PCB technology. For this purpose, low cost substrates like FR-4 are used. For the baseboard to waveguide transition in the E-Band (60-90GHz) a WR12 waveguide connector [1] was used. The WR12 waveguide was manufactured and analyzed on mechanical deviations. The RF performance in the E-Band was measured and compared to common PCB waveguides like microstrip lines (MS) and grounded coplanar waveguides (GCPW).