Contactless Excitation of Leaky-Wave Antennas

Abstract

A simple technique to enable a contactless excitation of a millimeter-Wave (mmWave) slot array Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA) is proposed and demonstrated using full-wave simulations at 30 GHz. It consists of a broadside coupled input section which can feed the input port of a LWA without any physical contact with the antenna. The frequency beam-scanning property of the resulting structure is demonstrated numerically showing a minimal effect on its performance compared to the LWA with a direct port excitation. This paves way for an electro-mechanically tunable LWA array suitable for mmWave frequencies.