Conformal Corrugated Substrate Integrated Waveguides for Radio Systems in Space

The paper presents a comparative analysis of different foldable corrugated substrate integrated waveguide (CSIW) structures. Unlike traditional SIWs, vias in a CSIW are replaced with different forms of corrugations. The corrugated design makes the structure lightweight and foldable, hence, it can be used as transmission lines on satellite systems. The paper compares the conformal performance for CSIWs with four types of corrugations: (a) straight; (b) J-shaped; (c) integrateddigitated capacitor; and (d) twisted. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the IDC-based CSIW offers the least transmission loss of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$&lt;0.7 ~\text{dB} / \mathrm{m}$</tex> and is comparable with conventional SIWs.