A Tapered CRLH Interdigital/Stub Leaky-Wave Antenna With Minimized Sidelobe Levels

A nonuniform (NU) tapered composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with minimized sidelobe level (SLL) is proposed. The design of this antenna is performed using an automated cosimulation approach based on a genetic algorithm optimization. Fair agreement is found between the full-wave and the experimental results. The experimental results show an 8-dB SLL reduction compared to a uniform CRLH LWA with the same gain in a 12-unit-cell structure.