Embedded Bed of Nails With Robustness Suitable for Broadband Gap Waveguide Technology

This article introduces a new type of contact-less electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure in the form of an embedded bed of nails. Compared with the traditional bed of nails structure, the smooth upper metal plate originally used to provide the perfect electrical conductor (PEC) boundary is replaced by periodic defect grooves, and the metal pins on the base block are embedded in these grooves without any electric contact. One of the advantages of the embedded EBG structure is that it has a robust tolerance for the height of the air gap. Therefore, this structure provides a cost-effective parallel plate mode suppression solution because it allows a low-precision manufacturing process level while maintaining the stability of the bandwidth. On the other hand, the proposed EBG structure can achieve a stopband range of several octaves. This characteristic makes it indeed suitable for wideband gap waveguides (GWs) to provide horizontal open boundaries. To verify the feasibility of the proposed approach, the new ridge gap waveguide (RGW) (with an embedded bed of nails) and the classic RGW (with a traditional bed of nails) with two 90° bends are designed, fabricated, measured, and compared. The experimental and simulation results are quite consistent and indicate that the embedded RGW has prominent advantages in bandwidth and robustness.