High Gain Optical Beam Scanning Antenna and Its Measurement

This paper presents high gain optical beam scanning antenna for short range communication system in future 6G. Optical wireless communication uses very high gain antenna to compensate large propagation loss. The beam width of high gain antenna is narrow and beam steering function is also necessary for optical antenna systems. Leaky wave antennas have simple feeding structure and the beam direction is steered by sweeping input wavelength, which is suitable for optical beam scanning antenna. As leaky wave optical antennas, waffle and waffle iron waveguides are presented in this paper. Their geometries are simple and easy to fabricate by silicon photonics technologies. To measure these antenna patterns, a phase-less measurement by a single scanning plane is also presented in this paper. The phase velocity of leaky waveguide is estimated by beam direction and the amplitude distribution is only measured. The proposed method shows very good agreement with simulation.