Wide-angle Beam-steering with Electronically-scanned Leaky Wave Antenna

We discuss the design of a reconfigurable leaky wave antenna capable of one-dimensional wide-angle beam-steering. It has a simple architecture consisting of a microstrip line loaded with individually addressed varactors. The biasing scheme of the varactors is determined from a numerical optimization procedure inspired by the design of electromagnetic metasurfaces. The proposed design method can identify loading configurations that produce the optimal radiation pattern while accounting for non-ideal effects such as amplitude tapering or end reflections. It can also identify designs with optimal impedance matching, which helps to extend the effective scan-range of the antenna.