A Magnetoelectric Dipole Leaky-Wave Antenna for Millimeter-Wave Application

Abstract

This paper presents a novel frequency beam scanning slotted leaky-wave magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna array for the fifth generation (5G) application. The proposed antenna, which has eighteen elements of slots and electric dipoles, is built on a two-layer printed circuit board. In the lower layer, it is a conventional slotted substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) leaky-wave antenna (LWA). In the upper layer, electric dipoles are attached to the design. As for each element unit, the magnetic dipole is realized by each lower-layer aperture, while the electric dipole is realized by each pair of patches in the upper layer. The design concept is that two modes are excited together in orthogonal directions to realize the ME dipole. By introducing electric dipoles to the conventional slotted LWA, the antenna exhibits less gain variation over a wide bandwidth. The SIW leaky-wave ME dipole antenna array is designed and fabricated to operate at the 28-GHz band. It operates with wide impedance bandwidth and a peak gain of 16.55 dBi with less than 3-dB gain variation throughout the frequency range from 27 to 32 GHz.