Electronically-reconfîgurable parallel-plate wave launchers based on corrugated substrate integrated leaky waveguides with tunable components

We present some initial designs of electronically-controlled circuits based on the corrugated substrate integrated leaky waveguide, which shunt open-ended quarter-wave stubs are loaded with tunable-capacitance components (such as varactor diodes, MEMs switches, or liquid crystals). It is demonstrated that this topology permits the electronic control over the angle at which the wave is launched on the host parallel-plate substrate. This way, original simple reconfigurable integrated circuits are envisaged. Full-wave simulations are performed on two preliminary C-band designs. The first circuit is an electronically-scanned plane-wave wave launcher for reconfigurable scanned slot-array antennas. The second design is a new type of quasi-optical single-pole four-throw (SP4T) switch for integrated beam forming networks.