A study on 3D-printed coplanar waveguide with meshed and finite ground planes

Abstract

Direct digital manufacturing technology is gaining increasing attention for RF and microwave applications. The introduction of new materials and processes utilized by this technology has triggered the need to study their high frequency performance. Challenges with this type of fabrication include the intrinsic surface roughness of materials produced using fused deposition modeling (FDM), control of the metallization thickness, minimum feature sizes, and the tolerance on the component dimensions. In this work, a fully printed coplanar waveguide (CPW) is fabricated and characterized. In addition, finite ground CPW (FGCPW) and a meshed ground CPW are implemented to reduce ink usage and printing time. To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first study of a meshed ground CPW.