Integrated Wideband Circularly Polarized Leaky Wave Antenna for Millimeter-Wave Application

Abstract

A novel wideband circularly polarized (CP) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) is developed in this paper. The proposed antenna consists of sixteen unit-cells, each of which combines a slot (magnetic dipole) and an electric dipole. A conventional slotted substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) LWA in the lower layer and the electric dipoles are etched on the upper layer. Two kinds of dipoles are placed in parallel to produce two orthogonal polarization components which results in the required CP operation. The CP LWA is designed and fabricated to operate at the 26 GHz Ka band. Measured results show that the antenna has a peak gain of 17.1 dBic with circular polarization throughout the frequency range from 24–28 GHz.