Printed-circuit leaky-wave antenna with pointing and illumination flexibility

A novel leaky-wave antenna, based on a periodic set of slots printed on a rectangular dielectric waveguide is conceived in this work. The antenna presents the ability to independently control the aperture illumination and the pointing direction, by only modifying the photoetched printed-circuit layout. The working mechanism is described using a leaky-mode dispersion analysis, and cosine-tapered designs are performed at 50 GHz. The radiation patterns are obtained using HFSS analysis to check the reduction of sidelobes levels, and the capacity to tune the pointing direction over a wide range of elevation angles. © 2005 IEEE.