This paper gives an overview on the design process of modulated metasurface (MTS) antennas and focus on their performance in terms of efficiency and bandwidth. The basic concept behind MTS antennas is that the MTS imposes the impedance boundary conditions (IBCs) seen by a surface wave (SW) propagating on it. The MTS having a spatially modulated equivalent impedance transforms the SW into a leaky wave with controlled amplitude, phase and polarization. MTS antennas are hence highly customizable in terms of performances by simply changing the IBCs imposed by the MTS, without affecting the overall structure. The MTS can be configured for high gain (high aperture efficiency) with moderate bandwidth, for wide bandwidth with moderate aperture efficiency, or for a trade-off performance for bandwidth and aperture efficiency. The design process herein described relies on a generalized form of the Floquet wave theorem adiabatically applied to curvilinear locally periodic IBCs. Several technological solutions can be adopted to implement the IBCs defined by the synthesis process, from sub-wavelength patches printed on a grounded slab at microwave frequencies, to a bed of nails structure for millimeter waves: in any case, the resulting device has light weight and a low profile.

A rigorous modal approach based on the transmission-line description has developed to explore effectively the filtering characteristics of planar optical DFB guiding structures. Using the modal transmission-line theory, the leakage and filtering characteristics of metal-strip gratings and dielectric gratings with gain or loss are first evaluated in details at the first- and third-order Bragg regimes. It can thus serve as a powerful template for computational algorithms to determine systematically and rigorously the optical effects of multilayered periodic guiding structures, which are not readily obtained by other methods.

The blazing effects of dielectric grating consisting of two adjacent sinusoidally modulated layers which lead to the asymmetric profiles on a substrate are analyzed by using improved Fourier series expansion method. This method can be applied to the wide range of grating structure and gave high accurate results by comparing with those obtained by previous method. In this paper, the efficient blazing effects can be achieved by varying normalized distance (w/p) and the normalized thickness (d1/D), where D is kept fixed. The results are greater than those of trapezoidal profiles and triangular profiles. The influences of the second order of modulation index on the radiation efficiencies and normalized leakage factor are also discussed.