Slow-Wave Propagation Properties of Substrate Integrated Waveguide Based on Anisotropic Artificial Material

In this paper, an inductor-loaded slow-wave substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) is presented and studied. The proposed structure features a number of unique propagation properties. First of all, the inductance value imposed along the transverse direction will affect the phase velocity and cutoff frequency of the waveguide simultaneously. Second, the inductance value in the longitudinal propagating direction will only affect the phase velocity but make no difference on the cutoff frequency. Based on the aforementioned characteristics, the size of structure could be controlled by separately tuning the loaded inductor along the transverse direction and longitudinal propagating direction. More importantly, it is released on the interrelationship between the phase velocity and cutoff frequency in the proposed guiding-wave structure. The feature will be beneficial to the design of leaky-wave antenna and matching circuits for SIW circuits. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that with the increasing of loaded inductance, a reduction of 35% in cutoff frequency is achieved compared with the conventional SIW counterpart. The phase velocity is also reduced by 35% with the increasing of the loaded inductor, which contributes to a miniaturized longitudinal dimension for a given electrical length.