Abstract

Millimeter-wave Substrate Integrated Printed Ridge Gap Waveguide Leaky-Wave Antenna for WiGig Applications 
Mohammad Reza Rahimi, MASc.
Concordia University, 2018

Leaky-wave antennas have been an interesting topic for researchers for more than half a century. As millimeter-wave frequencies applications are in high demand for communication companies due their wider bandwidth, designing a leaky-wave antenna, for this frequency range is becoming more challenging with the demand for low-loss and low-cost components. Since high-performance hollow waveguides, as a low loss guiding structure, drives the cost to an unacceptable level and microstrip technology, as a low-cost transition, has an unacceptably high loss. Therefore, the requirements for a new technology that achieves both low cost and high performance feels more tangible.

The new technology of substrate integrated printed ridge gap waveguide that was proposed in 2016 shows promising characteristics as a new modified gap waveguide structure for millimeter-wave applications in terms of low insertion loss and low cost. Therefore, it is necessary to propose a new desirable class of microwave components based on this technology. Here, we propose the use of this technology to design three leaky-wave antennas.

The work of this thesis is divided into three major parts: (1) designing a periodic structure which has a leaky mode for a specific range of frequencies, and (2) designing a 1D-periodic leaky-wave antenna based on a periodic structure and connecting the antenna to the standard 50 Ω equipment. For achieving this purpose a quasi-TEM transition and a transition from microstrip to substrate integrated ridge gap waveguide has been designed. In addition, the slots of the proposed antenna are designed in order to have an almost constant leakage ratio through the whole operating frequency band. (3) The third part will discuss a linear array of the proposed antenna in which a new termination has been considered which results in a shorter physical length. The proposed antennas can be easily fabricated with a low-cost multi-layered PCB technology. In addition, all these antennas designed for the WiGig applications which are more attractive for today's requirements.

Keywords:	Leaky-wave antenna; gap waveguide; electromagnetic band gap