Printed Tapered Leaky-Wave Antennas for W-Band Frequencies

Despite their great potential in communication and sensing applications, printed leaky-wave antennas have rarely been reported at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies. In this article, tapered leaky-wave antennas operating at 80 GHz are designed, fabricated, and experimentally characterized. While many continuous leaky-wave antennas use subwavelength strips or other comparably small elements, in this work, the surface impedance is discretized very coarsely using only three square patches per period. With this architecture, a wide range of surface reactance can be achieved while maintaining a minimum feature size of the metallic pattern that is feasible for printed circuit fabrication. Another advantage of this approach over existing works in the mm-wave frequency range is that it allows precise engineering of the aperture illumination. We demonstrate this by applying amplitude tapering for sidelobe suppression. A comprehensive experimental study is presented, including near- and far-field measurements. Therewith, we verify the designed aperture illumination and reveal the origin of spurious far-field features. Sidelobes are effectively suppressed and spurious radiation is reduced to -18 dB compared to the main lobe.