Reconfigurable Waveguides Using Glide-Symmetric Bed of Nails: Design of an All-Metal Switch at Millimetre-Wave Band

A reconfigurable millimeter-wave artificial waveguide using glide-symmetric pin-like contact-less metasurfaces is proposed in order to enable low loss and high-power-handling capability in switching operations. Thanks to the remarkable behaviour of glide symmetry, the meta-structures are used both as wide-band EBG material to confine the field in the guide and as low-dispersive guiding medium filling the guide itself. The reconfigurability is achieved by adjusting the displacement between the metasurfaces. A higher displacement enables propagation within the waveguide and a lower displacement suppresses it. A two-state reconfigurability is therefore designed, allowing the device to act as an on-off switch in the V-band. In particular, a dispersion analysis highlights the potential of such technology to achieve switching operating over a 55-66 GHz frequency range. A complete design including matching mechanism and WR15 feeding is also described and shown to exhibit a $S_{11}<-10$ dB bandwidth from 57.4 to 62.8 GHz. In the "off" state, the switch isolation is better than 65 dB and in the "on" state, the insertion losses are better than 0.7 dB within the entire operating frequency range. The isolation between two adjacent waveguides is also discussed to assess the integration of such a device within a switching network.