Holographic antennas: Principle of operation and design guidelines

In this paper, a systematic procedure to design a surface wave excited holographic antenna is proposed. First, an equivalent anisotropic surface impedance is defined by a combination of a desired aperture field and the average electric current distribution of the incident surface wave. This combination is then included as a constrain in an alternate projections process that is allowed for synthesizing an aperture field for a given mask of antenna directivity. Once each point of the antenna surface is characterized by a suitable impedance tensor, the latter is synthesized by a FFS-kind patch structure with variable dimension and geometry.