IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

12, 2013 417

Research on a Novel Miniaturized Antipodal Vivaldi
Antenna With Improved Radiation
Geer Teni, Ning Zhang, Jinghui Qiu, and Pengyu Zhang
AbstractA novel antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) is proposed
in this letter. The addition of regular slot edges (RSE) helps the
antenna lower the low-end operating frequency by 9% with the
dimension unaltered, while the radiation patterns at higher fre-
quencies are improved due to the loaded lens and the choke slot
edges (CSE) conguration at the termination of the ares, which
also contribute to the enhancement of antenna gain. The improved
antenna is fabricated and veried experimentally. The measured
results coincide with the simulated ones perfectly, which proves the
feasibility of the novel design.
Index TermsAntipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA), tapered slot
antenna (TSA), ultrawideband (UWB).
I. INTRODUCTION
W
ITH the development of wireless technology, antennas
with ultrawide impedance bandwidth are becoming
more potential in many multiband systems, such as high-speed
wireless communication, high-resolution imaging system, RF
jammer, and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing
systems [1], [2], compared to conventional installation of mul-
tiple antennas on one system. Stable radiation characteristics
are also required in the whole frequency band concerned. A
good candidate for such applications is double ridge guide
horn (DRGH) antennas, which have been studied and utilized
widely, such as the antenna investigated in [2] and [3]. How-
ever, DRGH antennas are relatively large, heavy, and expensive
to manufacture. The planar Vivaldi antenna seems to be very
suitable for this purpose since it gets over the defects of DRGH
antennas, and it has the characteristics of wide bandwidth, di-
rectional radiation pattern, etc. The tapered slot antenna (TSA)
was rst introduced as the exponential form, i.e., exponential
tapered slot antenna (ETSA) or Vivaldi antenna [4], [5]. Linear
TSA, constant-width TSA, parabolic TSA, Fermi TSA, and
logarithmic TSA are then investigated [6][10]. The dual
exponential tapered slot antenna (DETSA) originates from
the conventional Vivaldi antenna. The comparison between
a DETSA and other wideband antennas is carried out in [11]
and [12]. Both the inner and outer edges of the patches, which
are separated by the substrate, t exponential curves. The
antenna acts as a resonant antenna at lower frequencies, while
as a traveling wave antenna excited by slow leaky wave at
Manuscript received December 26, 2012; revised February 27, 2013;
accepted March 14, 2013. Date of publication March 20, 2013; date of current
version April 04, 2013.
The authors are with the School of Electronics and Information Engineering,
Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China (e-mail: tnge1983@sina.
com; zhangn@hit.edu.cn; qiujh@hit.edu.cn; pyzhang.mw@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2013.2253592
Fig. 1. Evolution procedure of the antenna. (a) AVA prototype. (b) AVA with
RSE. (c) Lens-loaded AVA with CSE and RSE.
higher frequencies. Electromagnetic wave travels along the
patch edges. The increase of the distance between the two
patches results in the weakening of their coupling. A balanced
microstrip line between the feeding microstrip line and the slot
are acts as a wideband impedance transformer. The impedance
bandwidth of a conventional DETSA is quite wide. However,
the radiation patterns at higher frequencies are not stable,
leading to the reduction of antenna gain [13], [14]. Therefore,
we propose a novel DETSA with loaded lens and planar choke
slot edges at the termination of the ares to improve its radia-
tion characteristics at higher frequencies [15], [16], resulting in
stable radiation patterns within the whole bandwidth.
II. ANTENNA GEOMETRY AND DESIGN
The evolution procedure of the antenna is shown in Fig. 1
with the prototype of an antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) in
Fig. 1(a). The corresponding dimension is 66.4 50 mm . The
antenna is fed by a microstrip line with the width of 1.5 mm,
whose characteristic impedance can be calculated as 50 , equal
1536-1225/$31.00 2013 IEEE
418 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013
Fig. 2. Comparison of reection coefcient between conventional AVA and
AVA with RSE.
Fig. 3. Geometrical structure of the lens.
TABLE I
FINAL OPTIMAL DIMENSION VALUES (UNIT:MILLIMETERS)
to that of the feeding coaxial cable. The thickness of the sub-
strate equals to 1 mm, while its relative permittivity is 4.5.
The inner and outer edges of the radiation ares t the fol-
lowing exponential curves:
(1)
indicates the distance between the inner exponential
edge and the central axis in the direction perpendicular to the
central axis, while indicates that between the outer ex-
ponential edge and the central axis. indicates the distance be-
tween the edge and bottom of the antenna in the direction par-
allel to the central axis. equals to 0.291, and equals to
0.084. The optimized results of other parameters are listed in
Table I.
An improved structure of conventional AVA is shown in
Fig. 1(b). Four pairs of symmetric rectangular slot edges are
Fig. 4. Aperture E-eld distribution of different antenna structures at 25 GHz.
(a) Amplitude. (b) Phase.
placed on both ns, i.e., the ripple structure described in [15]
and [16]. The length of each slot is approximated as ,
where refers to the wavelength corresponding to 4 GHz. The
novel structure enlarges the maximal electrical length of the
antenna effectively, contributing to lower operating frequencies
and wider bandwidth. It is veried that the low-end frequency
of the antenna decreases from 4.4 to 4 GHz.
Comparison of simulated reection coefcient between con-
ventional AVAand AVA with regular slot edges (RSE) is carried
out in Fig. 2. It is clear that the low-end operating frequency de-
creases from 4.4 to 4 GHz on condition that is lower than
10 dB, which indicates that the addition of RSE helps the an-
tenna miniaturized by 9%.
III. STRUCTURE AND DISCUSSION
Radiation patterns of conventional AVA are distorted seri-
ously at higher frequencies due to the traveling current at the
termination of the ares and major phase error at the radiation
aperture, which leads to instable radiation patterns and decrease
of antenna gain. Therefore, a lens is introduced here to decrease
the phase error at the antenna aperture by converting incident
cylindrical wave to plane wave. The lens curve equation can be
calculated as follows [17]:
(2)
(3)
(4)
TENI et al.: NOVEL MINIATURIZED ANTIPODAL VIVALDI ANTENNA WITH IMPROVED RADIATION 419
Fig. 5. Radiation pattern at 25 GHz. (a) Conventional AVA. (b) Lens-loaded
AVA with RSE. (c) Lens-loaded AVA with CSE and RSE.
Fig. 3 is the geometrical structure of the lens. The two tangent
lines corresponding to the inner exponential edges at the termi-
nation of the ares intersect at the focal point , where the feed
should be located. Fermats principle is utilized to equalize the
optical path length from the feed to the aperture plane. The lens
curve can be calculated by (2)(4), where stands for the re-
fractive index ( refers to the relative permittivity).
To eliminate the inuence of traveling current on radiation
patterns at higher frequencies further, choke slot edges (CSE)
are introduced at the termination of the ares [15]. The depth of
the choke slot edges equals to 1.9 mm, which approximates
, and is the wavelength corresponding to 25 GHz.
Relative optimized parameters and dimensions of the antenna
are listed in Table I. The nal dimension of the substrate is
66.4 50 mm .
Fig. 6. Gain of different antennas.
Fig. 7. Simulated and measured VSWR of lens-loaded AVA with CSE and
RSE.
Aperture E-eld distribution is obtained by simulation and
optimization, as shown in Fig. 4. E-eld amplitude and phase
variation along -axis are given in Fig. 4(a) and (b), respec-
tively. It is obvious that phase error on the antenna aperture is
greatly decreased by the addition of lens. The resulting uniform
amplitude and phase distribution contribute to higher aperture
efciency, lower sidelobe level, and higher gain. Meanwhile,
the addition of choke slot at the end of the radiation are re-
strains the surface current, which gives rise to the distortion of
radiation patterns at higher frequencies. The improvement leads
to the restrainment of sidelobe level and stable radiation pat-
terns, so the gain is enhanced efciently. Radiation patterns and
E-eld distribution are shown in Fig. 5, showing the improve-
ment of radiation characteristics due to the novel structure.
Gain comparison between different antennas is shown in
Fig. 6. Referring to lens-loaded AVA with RSE within the
frequency range from 10 to 30 GHz, the gain is increased by
at least 1 dB (13 GHz), while the maximal increase can reach
7 dB (23 GHz). The addition of CSE can increase the gain at
higher frequencies by 12 dB further.
Simulated and measured voltage standing wave
ratio (VSWR) of lens-loaded AVA with RSE and CSE are
shown in Fig. 7. Great coincidence can be observed within most
of the entire bandwidth. Noticing that the VSWR of this new
antenna structure is close to 2 (higher than 2 at some frequency
points of the measured results), the lens could somehow cause
420 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013
Fig. 8. E-plane and H-plane radiation patterns of the antennas at (a) 4, (b) 10,
(c) 20, and (d) 30 GHz.
impedance mismatch. Integrated optimization of the antenna
structure will be carried out in the following work.
Simulated and measured radiation patterns at different fre-
quencies of lens-loaded AVA with RSE and CSE are shown in
Fig. 8. It can be seen that the maximal radiation is along the cen-
tral axis of the tapered slot. E-plane 3-dB beamwidth changes
from 20 to 113 , while H-plane 3-dB beamwidth changes from
42 to 129 . Simulated and measured results agree well, except
for slight difference at higher frequencies that comes from the
fabrication error and inuence of the SMA connector on the ra-
diation characteristics.
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel antipodal Vivaldi antenna is proposed in this letter.
The low-end frequency is extended in the improved structure
with the help of the corrugated edges; radiation characteristics
are improved by the addition of the lens and choke slot at the ter-
mination of the ares, which also contributes to the increase of
the gain. Great performances within the whole frequency range
promote the application of the the antenna in high resolution,
high dynamic-range imaging radars that require high-perfor-
mance low-prole UWB antennas.
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