Design of CRLH Leaky-Wave Antenna With Low Sidelobe Level

Composite right/left-handed (CRLH) waveguide leaky-wave antenna (LWA) with low sidelobe level (SLL) and high radiation efficiency is investigated and designed in this paper. Due to the characteristic of negative and positive dominant mode propagation constant of the CRLH transmission line, a backward to forward beam-steering LWA can be realized through frequency scanning. The leaky-wave radiation is analyzed first based on a Ka-band CRLH waveguide with straight slots differently offset on the broadwall. The propagation constant maintains almost invariable as the slot offset varies, meanwhile the attenuation constant has a considerable dynamic range. Thus meandering long slot, whose offset varies along the CRLH waveguide, can be cut on the broadwall to generate a tapered excitation distribution. A prototype of the proposed CRLH waveguide LWA with meandering long slot is designed and fabricated to validate the design. Measurement results show that continuous beam-steering capability from -29° to +31° is achieved, meanwhile the optimized SLLs for the designed antenna patterns are kept below -18.5 dB in the major operating band with the minimum SLL of -22.4 dB at 33 GHz, and the average radiation efficiency is 65.4%. The realized SLLs and radiation efficiency performances of our CRLH LWA surpass others reported in open literatures.