A Metasurface-Enhanced Substrate-Integrated Waveguide Antenna.

The design, manufacture and characterization of a slotted waveguide antenna using substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology combined with a metasurface are described in this paper. The inclusion of the metasurface serves augments the radiation aperture and provides control over the E-plane cut of the antenna pattern, a characteristic that would otherwise be dictated by the slots. For demonstration, an 8-element slotted SIW (S-SIW) antenna array with a -20 dB sidelobe level Chebyshev distribution has been designed and its performance has been compared to that of a conventional slotted SIW array. Owing to the enlargement of the radiation aperture caused by the metasurface, the radiation pattern E-plane narrows and 3 dB gain improvement has been achieved, while matching has been unaffected. These results demonstrate that the use of a metasurface can be a solution for increasing the radiation aperture of SIW antennas without requiring an array configuration. In addition, the proposed low-profile configuration is compatible with standard PCB manufacturing processes.