A Printed UWB Vivaldi Antenna Using Stepped Connection Structure Between Slotline and Tapered Patches

698
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014
A Printed UWB Vivaldi Antenna Using Stepped

Connection Structure Between Slotline
and Tapered Patches
Jiangniu Wu, Zhiqin Zhao, Senior Member, IEEE, Zaiping Nie, Fellow, IEEE, and Qing-Huo Liu, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractIn this letter, a new stepped connection structure between slotline and tapered patches is adopted in a planar printed
Vivaldi antenna. By using the stepped connection structure, the
impedance matching is significantly improved and a wide bandwidth is achieved. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of this design, a prototype of the modified Vivaldi antenna is fabricated and
tested. Experimental results show that the impedance matching is
significantly improved in the band from 3 to 15.1 GHz. In addition, a measured gain, which is better than 5 dBi, is obtained with
a compact size. Compared to other techniques, the presented technique effectively improves the impedance matching and enlarges
the bandwidth without changing the overall dimensions. Moreover,
a relatively flat group time delay response is achieved within the
band of 315.1 GHz.
Index TermsGroup delay, printed Vivaldi antenna, ultrawideband antenna, unidirectional radiation pattern.
I. INTRODUCTION
LTRAWIDEBAND (UWB) wireless communication
technology has attracted much interest owing to its
features and advantages, such as high data rates and low fabrication cost. As an indispensable component, UWB antennas are
facing many challenges. One challenge of the UWB antenna
design is how to miniaturize the antenna size with a wide
impedance bandwidth and good radiation performance [1].
Relatively flat gain through the entire band as well as linear
group time delay is also very important in some UWB systems.
The Vivaldi antenna is one of the best candidates for the UWB
technology due to its broad bandwidth, low cross polarization,
and highly directive radiation patterns [2]. However, the Vivaldi
antenna always needs a large antenna size to achieve good performance [3]. Tapering both inner and outer edges of a Vivaldi
antenna can also broaden the bandwidth and improve the radiation performance [4][6]. However, the antenna size is still
relatively large.
Manuscript received January 08, 2014; revised March 26, 2014; accepted
March 26, 2014. Date of publication April 01, 2014; date of current version
April 18, 2014. This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grants 61171044 and 61231001, the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under
Grants ZYGX2012YB010 and 2672013ZYGX2013z002, and the Research
Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant
20120185110024. (Corresponding author: Z. Zhao.)
J. Wu, Z. Zhao, and Z. Nie are with the School of Electronic Engineering,
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu
610054, China (e-mail: zqzhao@uestc.edu.cn).
Q. H. Liu is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 USA (e-mail: qhliu@ee.duke.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2014.2314739
Some techniques have been proposed to miniaturize the Vivaldi antenna size [7][10]. A small antipodal Vivaldi antenna
proposed in [7] has a wide bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, but
this design pays the price of low antenna gain. The antipodal Vivaldi antenna presented in [8] utilized a tapered slot edge to extend the low-end limitation for miniaturizing the antenna size.
A relatively large size is also needed. An elliptical strip conductor was used to modify an antipodal tapered slot antenna
in [9]. Slot-loaded technique was adopted in [10]. Though the
impedance matching can be improved by employing these two
techniques, a large antenna size is also required. The antenna
in [11] realized a wide bandwidth with a relatively small size.
However, this design paid the price of low antenna gain, especially in the low frequency band.
In this letter, a compact planar printed Vivaldi antenna is designed and fabricated. A new stepped connection structure is applied to improve the impedance matching. Compared to other
techniques proposed in [9] and [10], the stepped connection
structure is very effective to improve the impedance matching
without changing the overall dimensions. In addition, the proposed antenna achieves a high gain better than 5 dBi. The gain
of the proposed antenna is higher than that of the antenna in [7],
especially in the low frequency band. This letter is organized as
follows. In Section II, the structure of the antenna is presented.
Simulation and experimental results are given in Section III.
Conclusions are drawn in Section IV.
II. ANTENNA STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE
Originated from [7], a planar printed Vivaldi antenna is designed and shown in Fig. 1(a). FR-4 is used as its substrate with
a relative permittivity of 4.4 and a thickness of 0.8 mm. This antenna consists of a microstrip-to-slotline transition structure and
two symmetrically exponential tapered patches. The two exponential tapered patches are connected to the slotline at the right
and left edges. The microstrip-to-slotline transition structure is
used to excite the antenna. In this design, a stepped microstrip
feeding line is adopted for good impedance matching. The width
of the microstrip feeding line is fixed to 1.5 mm to achieve 50characteristic impedance. The inner and outer exponential tapered edges of the tapered patches are described in [7]
(1)
(2)
where and
are the inner and outer edges, respectively.
For the microstrip-to-slotline transition structure, its effect is
to realize field matching between the microstrip mode and the
1536-1225 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
WU et al.: PRINTED UWB VIVALDI ANTENNA USING STEPPED CONNECTION STRUCTURE BETWEEN SLOTLINE AND TAPERED PATCHES
699
Fig. 1. Schematic view of the planar printed Vivaldi antennas. (a) Original design. (b) Modified antenna with stepped connection structure.
Fig. 3. Simulated input impedance of the proposed antenna with different connection structures.
Fig. 2. Simulated load impedance of the exponential tapered patches with dif.
ferent gap
Fig. 4. Effect of the gap

on VSWR results and gains of the proposed printed
Vivaldi antenna with different connection structures.
slotline mode. Good impedance transformation between the low

impedance of microstrip line and the high impedance of slotline can be realized. Therefore, the microstrip-to-slotline transition is regarded as a two-port device with microstrip line input
and slotline output. For the designed antenna, the two exponential tapered patches are connected to the slotted line of the
microstrip-to-slotline transition structure, thus the exponential
tapered patches can be regarded as a load of the slotted line.
Impedance matching between the slotted line and the exponential tapered patches has a significant effect on the VSWR result of the proposed antenna. Therefore, the main objective of
the proposed antenna is to improve the impedance matching
between the slotline and the two tapered patches. The slotted
line has high characteristic impedance (about 120 ). Thus, the
load impedance is investigated. The exponential tapered patches
were used to simulate the load impedance. It is in isolation of
the slotted line. The used geometry is provided in Fig. 2.
Simulated load impedance is obtained by changing the
gap
between the two tapered patches as given in Fig. 2. It
is observed that the real part of load impedance is lower than
120 when the distance between the two tapered patches is
equal to 0.6 mm. The real part of the load impedance increases
along with the increase of gap
, while the imaginary part
slightly changes. High load impedance can be obtained by
increasing the gap
. Therefore, the impedance matching
between the slotted line and the exponential tapered patches
can be improved by increasing the gap
between the two
tapered patches.
Fig. 1(b) illustrates the modified antenna. A stepped connection is adopted between the slotted line and the tapered patches
to increase the gap

between the two tapered patches. By
using this stepped connection, a high load impedance of the
tapered patches is obtained. The impedance matching between
the slotted line and the two tapered patches is then improved,
and good overall impedance matching of the proposed antenna
can be obtained. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the
stepped connection structure on the input impedance matching,
the effect of gap
on the input impedance and VSWR results
of the designed antenna is numerically studied.
Fig. 3 shows the simulated input impedance of the printed
Vivaldi antenna with different connection structures. Compared
to the antenna with a uniform connection structure
,
the stepped connection realizes a better input impedance. The
real part is closer to 50 , and the imaginary part is closer to
0 . Better impedance matching can be obtained by using the
stepped connection. Effect of the gap
on VSWR results
and antenna gains are shown in Fig. 4. For the original antenna
, the input impedance is not matched from 13 to 15 GHz.
However, the impedance matching between 1315 GHz is significantly improved when the gap
increases to 1.8 mm
for the modified antenna as shown in Fig. 1(b). From electromagnetic (EM) simulations, the simulated directivity has
little change when the original structure
is changed to
the new stepped connection structure. Therefore, the stepped
structure will not actually result in a measurable improvement
in gain. This is because the geometry change of the stepped
structure is only 1/20 of a wavelength at the highest frequencies. The simulated gain of the modified antenna has a little
increase in the high frequency band from 12 to 15 GHz due to
the improved impedance matching at the highest frequencies.
700
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014
Fig. 5. Photographs of the fabricated antenna. (a) Top view. (b) Bottom view.
Fig. 6. Simulated and measured VSWR results of the printed Vivaldi antenna
with stepped connection structure.
TABLE I
FINAL OPTIMAL DIMENSION VALUES (UNIT: MILLIMETERS)
Fig. 7. Simulated and measured gains and measured radiation efficiency of the
printed Vivaldi antenna with stepped connection structure.
sured results may be due to the effect of the SMA connector

and fabrication imperfections.
The simulated and measured gains of the proposed antenna
are shown in Fig. 7. It can be seen that the simulated and measured results agree well with each other. According to the measured result, the minimum gain of 5.1 dBi is noticed at 5 GHz,
and the maximum gain of 8.2 dBi is at 9.2 GHz in the band from
3 to 15 GHz. This means that the realized gain is better than
5 dBi in the operating frequency band. The differences between
the simulated and measured results may be caused by the substrate loss and the measurement errors. The measured radiation
efficiency is also shown in Fig. 7. It is observed that the radiation
efficiency is better than 70% within the effective bandwidth.
Though the antennas in [7] and [11] have similar size compared to the proposed antenna, the proposed antenna can achieve
a wider bandwidth and higher gain. The antennas in [3], [5],
and [8] can provide wide bandwidths with the sizes of 50 50,
136 66, and 48 60 mm , respectively. The proposed antenna can achieve the similar gain and bandwidth with a relatively smaller size of 41 48 mm .
B. Radiation Patterns
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

The dimensions of the antenna are optimized. Achieving
good impedance matching and high gain are the main objectives
in the optimization procedure. By optimization, the final optimal dimensions are obtained and listed in Table I. The
substrate size of the antenna is
mm . A
prototype of the proposed antenna is fabricated and tested
for the purpose of supporting the design. Photographs of the
fabricated antenna are shown in Fig. 5. A 50- SMA connector
is used to feed the fabricated antenna. The fabricated antenna
is measured by using an Agilent E8363B programmable network analyzer (PNA) and SATIMO measurement system. The
-plane and
-plane represent the E-plane and H-plane.
A. VSWR and Gains
Fig. 6 shows the simulated and measured VSWR results of
the printed Vivaldi antenna with the stepped connection structure. It is observed that the experimental results are in good
agreement with the simulation results. The measured impedance
bandwidth, defined by
, is from 3 to 15.1 GHz with
a ratio of about 5:1. This proves the effectiveness of the proposed design. The difference between the simulated and mea-
In order to demonstrate the radiation performance of the

printed Vivaldi antenna with the stepped connection structure,
its radiation patterns are also measured. The simulated and
-plane) and H-plane
measured radiation patterns in E-plane (
(
-plane) at 3.5, 7, 10, and 14 GHz are depicted in Fig. 8. It
is observed that the experimental results are in good agreement
with the simulation results. More importantly, according to
the plots, the proposed antenna exhibits good unidirectional
radiation patterns in the E- and H-planes. Over the operating
frequency band, the main lobes of the radiation patterns are
fixed in the endfire direction ( -axis direction). Stable radiation
directivity is achieved.
C. Group Delay
Group time delay, which is a critical parameter for the proposed ultrawideband antenna, is studied as well. In theory, the
group delay of a UWB antenna is a function of looking angle.
Because the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna exhibit
good unidirectional radiation characteristics, the group time
delay is investigated in the maximum radiation direction.
In this letter, two identical antennas were placed face to face
over a distance of 150 mm. One antenna is used to transmit a
signal, and the other one is used to receive the signal. The group
WU et al.: PRINTED UWB VIVALDI ANTENNA USING STEPPED CONNECTION STRUCTURE BETWEEN SLOTLINE AND TAPERED PATCHES
701
Fig. 9. Simulated and measured group delay of the proposed printed Vivaldi
antenna with stepped connection structure.
IV. CONCLUSION
A compact planar printed Vivaldi antenna is designed and
fabricated in this letter. By using a new stepped connection
structure between the slotline and the exponentially tapered
patches, the impedance matching of the antenna is significantly
improved. Simulated and measured results show that the presented antenna can realize a wide bandwidth with a gain better
than 5 dBi. Compared to other techniques, the proposed technique is very effective without changing the overall antenna
dimensions. In addition, a relatively flat group delay response
is achieved in the working frequency band.
REFERENCES
Fig. 8. Simulated and measured radiation patterns of the proposed printed Vi-plane) and -plane (
-plane) at different frevaldi antenna in -plane (
quencies. (a) 3.5 GHz. (b) 7 GHz. (c) 10 GHz. (d) 14 GHz.
time delay was obtained by measuring the transmission coefficient between the two antennas. The simulated and measured
results of group time delay are shown in Fig. 9. As shown in
this figure, the group time delay is around 1.3 ns with a variation of less than
ns in the operating band. This means that
a relatively flat group delay response is achieved.
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[2] K. S. Yngvesson, T. L. Korzeniowski, Y. Kim, and E. L. Kollberg,
The tapered slot antennaA new integrated element for millimeterwave applications, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 37, no. 2,
pp. 365374, Feb. 1989.
[3] D.-H. Lee, H.-Y. Yang, and Y.-K. Cho, Tapered slot antenna with
band-notched function for ultrawideband radios, IEEE Antennas
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[4] M. C. Greenberg, K. L. Virga, and C. L. Hammond, Performance
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[5] S. Nikolaou, G. E. Ponchak, J. Papapolymerou, and M. M. Tentzeris,
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[7] A. Z. Hood, T. Karacolak, and E. Topsakal, A small antipodal Vivaldi antenna for ultrawide-band application, IEEE Antennas Wireless
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[8] P. Fei, Y.-C. Jiao, W. Hu, and F.-S. Zhang, A miniaturized antipodal
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[9] J. Y. Siddiqui, Y. M. M. Antar, A. P. Freundorfer, E. C. Smith, G.
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698

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

A Printed UWB Vivaldi Antenna Using Stepped

Fig. 4. Effect of the gap

slotline mode. Good impedance transformation between the low

to increase the gap

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

sured results may be due to the effect of the SMA connector

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In order to demonstrate the radiation performance of the

[1] Z. N. Chen, T. S. P. See, and X. Qing, Small printed ultrawideband

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