Beam Steerable Leaky Wave Antenna using FPMS

This paper presents a Leaky wave antenna (LWA) with beam steering capability achieved by controlling substrate permittivity using Field Programable Microwave Substrate (FPMS). The planar antenna consists of grounded dielectric slab (GDS), surface wave launcher (SWL) and FPMS unit cells. The leaky wave radiations are produced by interaction of surface waves and metallic strips which are mounted on surface of the substrate. The FPMS unit cell has the ability to change the substrate permittivity in a range of frequencies thus enabling maximum steering of 17° at 10 GHz. The antenna occupies 101 × 20 mm2 with a −10dB bandwidth of 0.4 GHz.