Vanadium Dioxide (VO2)–Switched Leaky-Wave Antenna for V-Band Beam Steering

초록

This paper presents a vanadium dioxide (VO2)–switched leaky-wave antenna (LWA) for reconfigurable beam steering in the V-band. Conventional reconfigurable LWAs often rely on radio-frequency switches, such as positive–intrinsic–negative or varactor diodes, which suffer from significant losses due to parasitic effects at millimeter-wave (mm-wave) frequencies. To overcome this limitation, the proposed design leverages thermally controlled VO2 switches that exhibit a reversible insulator-to-metal phase transition. The LWA structure comprises periodically arranged circular patches on both sides of a corrugated microstrip line (CML), which supports slow-wave propagation and enables controlled leaky-wave radiation. Periodic metallic vias embedded along the center of the CML offer beam-steering capability, which is reconfigured by toggling the VO2 switches between their insulating and metallic states. Measurements demonstrate that with the VO2 switches in the ON state, the main beam scans from –50° to –32° across 52–58 GHz; in the OFF state, the beam scans from –30° to –19° over the same frequency range. The peak realized gains reach 13.8 dBi (ON) and 10.5 dBi (OFF). This study represents the first experimental demonstration of VO2-enabled beam reconfiguration in an LWA, facilitating the development of compact, thermally tunable beam-steering solutions for mm-wave frequencies.

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