  This paper presents an efficient method to compute the dispersion diagram of
periodic and uniform structures with generic anisotropic media. The method
takes advantage of the ability of full-wave commercial simulators to deal with
finite structures having anisotropic media. In particular, the proposed method
extends the possibilities of commercial eigenmode solvers in the following
ways: (i) anisotropic materials with non-diagonal permittivity and permeability
tensors can be analyzed; (ii) the attenuation constant can easily be computed
in both propagating and stopband regions and lossy materials can be included in
the simulation; and (iii) unbounded and radiating structures such as leaky-wave
antennas can be treated. The latter feature may be considered the most
remarkable, since the structures must be forcefully bounded with
electric/magnetic walls in the eigensolvers of most commercial simulators. In
this work, the proposed method is particularized for the study of liquid
crystals (LCs) in microwave and antenna devices. Thus, the dispersion
properties of a great variety of LC-based configurations are analyzed, from
canonical structures, such as waveguide and microstrip, to complex
reconfigurable phase shifters in ridge gap-waveguide technology and leaky-wave
antennas. Our results have been validated with previously reported works in the
literature and with commercial software CST and HFSS.
