The sidelobe level at tilts around 30-40 degrees in both the E and H planes due to a tapered excitation of units of 2×2 radiation slots is suppressed by introducing slit layers over a corporate-feed waveguide slot array antenna. The slit layers act as averaging the excitation of the adjacent radiating slots for sidelobe suppression in both planes. A 16×16-element array in the 70GHz band is fabricated. At the design frequency, the sidelobe levels at tilts around 30-40 degrees are suppressed from -25.4dB to -31.3dB in the E-plane and from -27.1dB to -38.9dB in the H-plane simultaneously as confirmed by measurements. They are suppressed over the desired range of 71.0-76.0GHz frequencies, compared to the conventional antenna.

A W-band corporate-feed 16×16-slot array antenna with low sidelobe level is designed and fabricated. The basic unit of the array is a 2×2-circular-slot subarray with step square cavities and uses an E-plane waveguide as the feeding line. An efficient method to design an unequal power-splitting ratio but equal phase (UPEP) E-plane waveguide T-junction (E-T) is proposed for constructing a 1-to-64 power-tapering feed network, which is the critical part to realize low sidelobe level. The whole array is fabricated with aluminum by milling and bonded by the vacuum brazing process. The measured results demonstrate that the array can achieve a 7.2% bandwidth with VSWR<1.5 and holistic sidelobe levels lower than -23.5dB in E-plane and H-plane from 89GHz ∼ 95.8GHz. The measured gain is higher than 31.7dBi over the working band with the antenna efficiency better than 67.5%.