In the proposed work, Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) cavity-backed circularly polarized slot antenna for wideband operation is proposed. A square-ring-slot is etched on the top of the SIW cavity, used for radiation To generate the circularly polarized (CP) wave, the slot is placed slightly offset from the centroid of the cavity. By finely optimizing the antenna dimensions, it exhibits a wide axial-ratio (AR) bandwidth of 789 MHz (7.1%) ranging from 10.64 to 11.45 GHz. Moreover, the radiating slot is excited by an SIW based feed by an inductive window, which lead to a wide impedance matching over 1.74 GHz ranging from 9.92 to 11.67 GHz. Due to the SIW cavity-backing structure, the antenna offers unidirectional radiation patterns while maintaining a low-profile and planar compatibility. To validate the proposed design, the antenna is fabricated and experimentally tested in terms of reflection coefficients, AR, gain, and radiation patterns. The simulated and measured results reveal good mutual agreement. Moreover, the proposed antenna is very useful for wideband applications operating in X-band (8–12 GHz) © 2018 Elsevier GmbH