Beam-Steerable Microstrip-Line Based Leaky Wave Antenna With Reconfigurable Slits

In this study, we propose a leaky wave antenna capable of forming beams through radiation from slits on a microstrip line, with the beam direction steerable based on the pattern of the slits. The pattern of the slits can be changed by the opening and closing of switches loaded onto the slits, and the patterns are determined from the desired beam angle. Based on the proposed structure, we designed an antenna with 16 slits operating at 28 GHz. The initial design exhibits large reflection coefficients when forming beams in the 0 degrees direction. In order to reduce the reflection, we added matching slots in the microstrip line and adjusted the slot length to suppress the reflection. The final antenna shows the beam steering capability from -30 degrees to +30 degrees by setting the radiation phase of the slits.