62 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO.

1, JANUARY 2014
Analysis of Loaded Substrate Integrated
Waveguides and Attenuators
Ruo Feng Xu, A. J. Farrall, and P. R. Young
AbstractThis letter provides an approximate analysis of a
slotted substrate integrated waveguide with periodic loading
elements using the transverse resonance technique. The technique
is used to design a travelling wave attenuator whereby pin diodes
are capacitively coupled to the waveguide slot. By changing the
bias, and therefore loading resistance, a very constant, variable
attenuation is produced over the waveguide band.
Index TermsAttenuator, substrate integrated waveguide
(SIW).
I. INTRODUCTION
S
UBSTRATE integrated waveguides (SIW) have become
an important host transmission line for microwave and mil-
limeter-wave circuits and systems, allowing hybrid waveguide
and planar structures to be formed on a single laminate [1] or
thick lm substrate [2]. Many variations on the simple SIW
have been proposed, with the purpose of increasing the oper-
ational bandwidth or decreasing the cross-sectional size of the
waveguide, these include folded SIW [3] and half mode SIW
[4]. Active and discrete devices can be integrated with SIW but
usually require transitions to planar transmission lines such as
microstrip or coplanar waveguide. These transitions can be rel-
atively large and can suffer from radiation and mismatch losses.
To overcome this problem, and integrate discrete components
directly with SIW, the authors recently proposed the Slotted
SIW (SSIW) which has propagation characteristic similar to
half mode SIW [5] but with the advantage of easy integration
of lumped element devices across the slot.
This letter provides an approximate analysis of periodically
loaded SSIW by means of the transverse resonance technique.
The technique can be used for reactive, resistive or complex
valued loading elements. To illustrate the usefulness of the
method the technique is used to design a travelling wave
attenuator in SSIW. The attenuator is shown to give a good
constant, variable, attenuation across the 35 GHz range with
return loss better than 15 dB.
Manuscript received March 27, 2013; revised July 01, 2013; accepted Oc-
tober 13, 2013. Date of publication November 08, 2013; date of current version
January 06, 2014. This work was supported in part by the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities, project number: 2013QNB27.
R. F. Xu is with the School of Information and Electrical Engineering, China
University of Mining and Technology, Beijing 221116, China.
A. J. Farrall and P. R. Young are with the Broadband and Wireless
Communications group, University of Kent, Kent CT2 7LU, U.K. (e-mail:
p.r.young@kent.ac.uk).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LMWC.2013.2288180
Fig. 1. Structure of periodically loaded slotted SIW and transverse resonance
equivalent circuit.
II. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
A. Transverse Resonance Analysis
We consider a slotted SIW where the slot is loaded with an
impedance , see Fig. 1. The impedance could either be
formed by a distributed structure, such as a resistive layer across
the slot, or by periodically loaded discrete components, with pe-
riod much less than a wavelength.
Fig. 1 also shows the equivalent circuit, in the transverse di-
rection, of one unit cell of the periodically loaded slotted wave-
guide. We model the loaded slot by a pi-network where and
take account of the effective shunt capacitances of the
fringing elds at the slot and is the parallel combination of
the loading element and slot capacitance . It is well known
that at resonance the condition must be met,
where is the impedance seen looking towards the left from
the left hand side of the slot and is the impedance at the
same point looking towards the right. By expressing the pi-net-
work in terms of its ABCDparameters, the transverse resonance
condition yields
(1)
where the impedance seen looking to the right, from the right
hand side of the slot, is . The unknown
transverse propagation constant is where
and are the transverse attenuation and phase constants, re-
spectively. , , and are the ABCD parameters of the
pi-network and are related to , and , see [6] for example.
1531-1309 2013 IEEE
XU et al.: ANALYSIS OF LOADED SUBSTRATE INTEGRATED WAVEGUIDES AND ATTENUATORS 63
Equation (1) is transcendental but can be solved for using
the common root solving algorithms such as Gauss-Newton or
Levenberg-Marquardt. Once is determined the longitudinal
propagation constant can be calculated from
, where is the longitudinal attenuation constant,
is the phase constant and is the propagation constant of the
substrate material, . If the loading element has a
resistive element then is complex and (1) becomes a coupled
non-linear equation in and . This can be difcult to solve
without a guess value for the root solving algorithm. In order
to do this, it is useful to rst solve a reduced form of (1) by
assuming that the shunt capacitances can be neglected, such that
, and . Equation (1) then reduces
to
(2)
where . This equation is more straightforward to
solve than (1) since the poles of the tanh functions are known,
allowing the range of values between which the solution lies
to be easily determined. It is usual, that either the real or imag-
inary part of is more signicant and consequently will be
approximately real or imaginary. In this case a simple bisection
technique can be used to calculate the roots of (2). This value
can then be used as a starting guess for (1).
The stubs in the equivalent transverse circuit are effectively
parallel plate waveguides of height and cell width, . The char-
acteristic impedance is therefore .
B. Results
Fig. 2 shows comparisons between the transverse resonance
technique and full wave solutions using CST (Computer Simu-
lation Technology, Microwave Studio www.cst.com). Both the
effective permittivity, , and attenuation con-
stant, in , of the fundamental mode are compared for
a resistively loaded SSIW, where . The structure
has height , , , slot
width and relative permittivity . Solu-
tions are shown for resistive loading elements of 1000 and
15 separated by 5 mm. For accuracy, the values of and
are obtained from full-wave simulation yielding values of
and for a 5 mm length. This
compares very well with the approximate expression in [7] of
, at 3 GHz. Reference [7] does not provide
approximate expressions for but numerical results demon-
strate that for narrow slots is at least an order of magni-
tude smaller than . As can be seen from Fig. 2 there is good
agreement between the full-wave solutions and values com-
puted from (1). When the resistance is large, the waveguide op-
erates like a type mode of a half mode waveguide of
width , with a small loss due to the resistance. When the re-
sistance is small the loading element acts like a short circuit and
the mode is of a type mode of a wide un-slotted
waveguide.
III. TRAVELLING WAVE ATTENUATOR
To demonstrate the transverse resonance method a variable
attenuator operating over the 35 GHz range was designed. The
Fig. 2. Comparison between full-wave (CST) and transverse resonance values.
Fig. 3. Fundamental mode of a slotted waveguide loaded with a resistance of
varying values using the transverse resonance technqiue.
cut-off frequency of the waveguide is predominantly set by the
dimension and, for , gives a cut-off frequency
of 3 GHz using (1). For an adequate range of attenuation a sec-
tion of length was used. Fig. 3 shows the for-
ward gain, , that this length of waveguide
produces, for varying values of loading resistance using (1) with
all other dimensions the same as Section II-B. The loading resis-
tors are spaced at 5 mm intervals and range in value from 5000
to 5 . It is seen that by varying the loading resistance over the
5000300 range the propagation remains as a type
mode with variable attenuation.
To experimentally verify the design, the structure shown
in Fig. 4 was fabricated using Rogers RT5880. A 12
thick mylar overlay with 25 thick adhesive is placed over
the waveguide to allow an array of twenty-eight Inneon
BAR64-02 silicon pin diodes to be capacitively coupled to the
waveguide slot in a similar manner to [5]. The diodes provide a
controllable resistance ranging from a few 1000 for a reverse
bias voltage down to a few ohms for 10 mA forward current.
Each diode is separated by 5 mm with the bias applied across
two thin tracks on the overlay. Surface mount inductors are
soldered directly to the top and bottom copper feed tracks to
limit coupling of the RF signal to the bias network. The diodes
are connected to thick tracks that provide an approximate
64 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 24, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Fig. 4. Structure of travelling wave attenuator.
Fig. 5. Measured S-parameters of the variable attenuator structure given in
Fig. 4 for various values of forward current and reverse bias voltage.
2.5 pF capacitance between the pin diodes and each side of the
slot. Tapered transitions to microstrip are used to enable the
structure to be connected to SMA connectors for measurement.
Fig. 5 shows measured results for the S-parameters of the
structure obtained using an Anritsu vector network analyzer
(37397C). A coax SOLT calibration was performed and as such
the SMA connectors are not de-embedded from the measure-
ments. Measurements were performed for a range of forward
bias currents by adjusting the dc supply voltage on Rapid Elec-
tronics PSU; a reverse bias condition of 30 V (no dc current)
was also considered. The forward current shown in the Fig. 5
are the individual diode forward bias currents of 1.8, 7.1, 14.3
and 21.4 , these values were obtained by applying 50, 200,
400 and 600 , respectively, to the bias structurethe current
being divided equally amongst the 28 diodes. To obtain the cor-
responding resistance values for these bias conditions, the pin
diode resistance was measured by performing a coaxial SOLT
calibration and connecting a diode directly to an SMA con-
nector. After de-embedding the connector it was found that the
resistance of an individual pin diode, over the 25GHz range,
was approximately 300 for a 21.4 forward current, 450
for a 14.3 , 800 for 7.1 , 1800 for 1.8 bias and
greater than 3000 when a 30 V reverse bias voltage was ap-
plied. These values are shown in brackets on Fig. 5.
It is seen from Fig. 5 that the structure provides a variable at-
tenuation from 2 to 25 dB over the waveguide band. The results
follow the general trend of Fig. 3; however Fig. 3 does not accu-
rately predict the values of attenuationthe cut-off frequency
shifting to 2.7 GHz and the attenuation displaying a more con-
stant response with frequency in Fig. 5. Fig. 5 also shows an
increase in attenuation above 4.5 GHz. It is believed that both
the change in cut-off frequency and the other differences in at-
tenuation are due to the parasitic components of the diode and
biasing network which load the slot in a complicated manner.
IV. CONCLUSION
This letter has presented an approximate transverse resonance
analysis of a periodically loaded slotted SIW. The technique has
shown good agreement with full-wave solutions. The technique
was further used to design a variable attenuator with good match
and constant attenuation over a relatively wide bandwidth. The
structure may nd application for matching, power limiting and
amplitude modulation applications particularly if scaled for mil-
limeter-wave designs.
REFERENCES
[1] D. Deslandes and K. Wu, Integrated microstrip and rectangular wave-
guide in planar form, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 11,
no. 2, pp. 6870, Feb. 2001.
[2] D. Stephens, P. R. Young, and I. D. Robertson, Millimeter-wave sub-
strate integrated waveguides and lters in photoimageable thick-lm
technology, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 53, no. 12, pp.
38223838, Dec. 2005.
[3] N. Grigoropoulos, B. Sanz Izquierdo, and P. R. Young, Substrate in-
tegrated folded waveguide (SIFW) and lters, IEEE Microw. Wireless
Compon. Lett., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 829831, Dec. 2005.
[4] W. Hong, B. Liu, Y. Q. Wang, Q. H. Lai, and K. Wu, Half mode
substrate integrated waveguide: A new guided wave structure for
microwave and millimeter wave application, in Proc. Joint 31st
Int. Conf. Infrared Millim. Waves 14th Int. Conf. Terahertz Electron,
Shanghai, China, Sep. 1822, 2006, p. 219.
[5] R. F. Xu, B. Sanz Izquierdo, and P. R. Young, Switchable substrate
integrated waveguide, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon. Lett., vol. 21,
no. 4, pp. 194196, Apr. 2011.
[6] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 2nd ed. : John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 1998.
[7] Y. K. Cho, On the equivalent circuit representation of the slitted par-
allel-plate waveguide lled with a dielectric, IEEE Trans. Antennas
Propag., vol. 37, no. 9, pp. 11931200, Sep. 1989.