Ka-Band AFSIW Circuit-On-Substrate for Satellite Applications

This letter demonstrates a circuit-on-substrate utilizing high-performance passive components based on the air-filled substrate-integrated waveguide (AFSIW) technology. Areceiver module, designed for space applications and operating in the satellite Ka-band frequency range, between 27.5 and 30.2GHz, is introduced. This module integrates both passive and active functions on a single multilayer printed circuit board (PCB). The passive functions include rectangular waveguide (RWG) to AFSIW transitions, circulators, loads, grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW) to AFSIW transitions for interconnecting surface-mounted low noise amplifiers (LNAs), and a bent 8th-order bandpass filter for compactness. The design of each passive component is introduced, followed by the integration and fabrication of a demonstrator. The circuit’s performance is experimentally validated, with a gain of 35.1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pm$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 1.76 dB, a return loss better than 14.7 dB, and a noise figure (NF) of 4.97 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pm$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 0.64 dB in the frequency band of interest. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first reported AFSIW circuit-on-substrate.