488 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

10, 2011

A Compact Monopole Antenna for

Super Wideband Applications
Ke-Ren Chen, Chow-Yen-Desmond Sim, Member, IEEE, and Jeen-Sheen Row

Abstract—A planar microstrip-fed super wideband monopole

antenna is initially proposed. By embedding a semielliptically
fractal-complementary slot into the asymmetrical ground plane,
a 10-dB bandwidth of 172% (1.44–18.8 GHz) is achieved with
ratio bandwidth 12:1. Furthermore, the proposed antenna also
demonstrated a wide 14-dB bandwidth from 5.4 to 12.5 GHz,
which is suitable for UWB outdoor propagation. This proposed
antenna is able to cover the DVB-H in -band (for PMP), DCS,
PCS, UMTS, Bluetooth, WiMAX2500, LTE2600, and UWB bands.
Index Terms—Bandwidth dimension ratio (BDR), fractal-com-
plementary, monopole antenna, super wideband (SWB).

I. INTRODUCTION

B ESIDES exploiting the ultrawideband (UWB) operating

band from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz for wireless personal area
network (WPAN) applications [1], the current users of WPAN
are also eagerly demanding a super wideband (SWB) to cover
both short- and long-range transmitting for ubiquitous services.
However, limited numbers of SWB antennas are reported in the
open literature [2]–[7], and the existing UWB antennas are not
efficient enough for diversified communication systems.
The present requirement for SWB antennas is to provide
at least a ratio bandwidth of 10:1 impedance bandwidth at
10-dB return loss. Hence, to achieve a ratio bandwidth up to
10.43:1 for a conventional rectangular-shaped coplanar wave-
guide (CPW)-fed monopole antenna, a restructured tapering
ground plane with a top-loaded notched radiating element
design is proposed [2]. Since the structure of the aforemen-
tioned antenna is too complicated, other simple-structured
SWB antenna designs such as the circular [3] or near-elliptical
monopole antenna [4] with ratio bandwidth up to 21.25:1 and
25.00:1 are studied, respectively. Although the elliptical [5] and
PICA [6] slot antennas design are also able to satisfy the SWB
requirement by demonstrating a ratio bandwidth of 15.38:1 and
13.63:1, respectively, their corresponding electrical dimensions
are and . Here, the wavelength
Manuscript received March 15, 2011; revised April 24, 2011; accepted May
12, 2011. Date of publication May 19, 2011; date of current version May 31,
2011.
K.-R. Chen is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Chung Chou
Institute of Technology, Yuanlin 510, Taiwan (e-mail: keren@dragon.ccut.edu.
tw).
C.-Y.-D. Sim is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Feng Chia
University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan (e-mail: cysim@fcu.edu.tw).
J.-S. Row is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National
Changhua University of Education, Chang-Hua 500, Taiwan (e-mail:
jsrow@cc.ncue.edu.tw).
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.2011.2157071
1536-1225/$26.00 © 2011 IEEE
Fig. 1. Geometry of the proposed monopole antenna (unit: millimeters).
refers to the lower-end frequency that meets the 10-dB return
loss. To meet the compact requirements, a printed semielliptical
SWB antenna with electrical dimension of and a
ratio bandwidth of 19.7:1 is introduced [7]. However, this SWB
antenna only operates between 0.46–0.97 GHz, which therefore
does not provide enough coverage for the UWB applications.
In this letter, a novel compact-size SWB antenna (also cov-
ering the UWB spectrum) with electrical dimensions
is proposed. By embedding a fractal-complementary slot
into the asymmetrical ground plane, the proposed antenna is
able to operate from 1.44 to 18.8 GHz with ratio bandwidth up to
13.06: 1. The design and effects of this fractal-complementary
slot will be discussed in detail via simulation. Typical experi-
mental results of the proposed antenna are also measured and
compared to its simulated counterparts.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN
The design of the proposed egg-shaped monopole antenna is
depicted in Fig. 1. It is printed off-center along the -axis on a
1.6-mm-thick FR4 substrate (permittivity 4.4 and loss tangent
0.02) with dimension 35 77 mm . To achieve impedance
matching that results in bandwidth enhancement, the technique
of loading a triangular notch at the feeding position in the
ground plane (35 43 mm ) is introduced [8], [9]. To allow the
SWB antenna to operate in a much lower frequency band of less
than 1.5 GHz, a semielliptical fractal-complementary slot is
embedded into the ground plane. Note that the physical concept
of introducing this slot into the ground plane is to reduce the
CHEN et al.: COMPACT MONOPOLE ANTENNA FOR SUPER WIDEBAND APPLICATIONS 489

ground plane effect by suppressing the electric currents on the

ground plane at lower-end operating frequency since the radia-
tion from the ground plane is inevitable as electric current will
distribute on both the radiating element (egg-shaped monopole)
and the ground plane [10].
The fractal shapes of the semielliptical slot are character-
ized by two factors: the iteration order (IO) and the iteration
factor (IF). The IO shows the number of iteration processes that
are carried out, and the IF represents the construction law of
fractal geometry generation. To determine the IF coefficient be-
tween the subconfiguration and original configuration on the
ground plane, the following equation is used:

(1)
Fig. 2. Simulated return losses of the two reference antennas (IO = 0; IO =
1) and the proposed antenna (IO = 2).
where and is defined as the major axis of original
configuration and subconfiguration radius in (1), respectively.
Here, the optimum IF values are mm and
mm . Note that the IO of the fractal-complemen-
tary slot is limited to 2 because of the manufacturing tolerance.

III. BANDWIDTH DIMENSION RATIO

The most conventional method to confirm the compactness of
one wideband (UWB/SWB) antenna against the other is to com-
pare their corresponding electrical dimension .
However, each UWB/SWB antenna published in the open liter-
ature is unique, and their bandwidth measured along 10-dB re-
turn loss will not be exactly the same, not to mention that their
starting frequencies (lower-end frequency, ) are most likely
to be different. Unlike the UWB antenna that has a standard op-
erating bandwidth that begins at 3.1 GHz, so that most authors
can refer to this frequency as the corresponding electrical di-
mension of their UWB antenna, the SWB antenna does not have
such an operating band standard.
Hence, to provide an equitable comparison between two
wideband antennas (especially UWB antenna), the authors
have defined a new index term that will allow antenna engineers
to identify if their planar antenna design (compared against
the other design) is very much compact in size and wide in
bandwidth. Here, to determine both the compactness and wide-
band characteristics of a planar antenna, an antenna index term
named the bandwidth dimension ratio (BDR) is introduced.
This index term will indicate how much operating bandwidth
(in percentage) can be provided per electrical area unit. The
equation is written as follows:
(2)
where is the wavelength of the lower-end operating frequency
that meets the 10-dB return loss. Here, a larger BDR will in-
dicate that the design antenna is smaller in dimension and wider
in bandwidth.
Notably, since the relative permittivity of the substrate used
by the antennas is not considered in (2), thus when applying the
BDR for comparing the compactness between two wideband an-
tennas of dissimilar structures and sizes, two conditions must be
observed: 1) the antennas must be of (planar) printed type; and
Fig. 3. Measured return losses of the proposed antenna and reference 1 antenna.
2) the differences in the substrate’s relative permittivity must be
as small as possible, so that the accuracy in comparing the com-
pactness between two wideband antennas by applying the BDR
can be reliable.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The optimized dimensions and impedance matching of the
proposed antenna is achieved by employing the commercially
available electromagnetic software simulator HFSS [11]. To
fully comprehend how the fractal-complementary slot will aid
in shifting the lower-end operating frequency to the lower band
and improving the 10-dB impedance bandwidth of the proposed
antenna with IF value fixed at 0.42, the simulated return losses
of the proposed antenna with fractal-complementary slot of dif-
ferent IO embedded into the ground plane are investigated and
shown in Fig. 2. Here, similar results are obtained when
and . However, when loaded with a second-order
IO fractal-complementary slot, the lower-end frequency of
the proposed antenna is shifted to 1.44 GHz from 1.74 GHz.
Except for a slight notch observed between 2–3-GHz bands,
this proposed technique is feasible if a lower operating band is
required for a wideband antenna.
The measured return losses of the proposed and reference 1
antenna are presented in Fig. 3. By comparing these results to
the simulated ones in Fig. 2, good agreement is demonstrated
490 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 10, 2011

TABLE I
BANDWIDTH, ELECTRICAL DIMENSION, AND BDR INDEX COMPARISON

especially on the lower-end frequency, whereby a shifted fre-

quency from 1.74 to 1.44 GHz is observed. Here, the 10-dB
bandwidth of the proposed antenna is 172% (from 1.44 to
18.8 GHz), and a ratio bandwidth of 13.06:1 is calculated.
Therefore, besides the ability to cover the Digital Cellular
System (DCS), Personal Communications System (PCS),
Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), Blue-
tooth, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access
2500 (WiMAX2500), Long-Term Evolution 2600 (LTE2600),
and UWB spectrums, the proposed antenna can also cover
the operating spectrum of digital video broadcasting-hand-
held (DVB-H) in -band (1452–1492 MHz) for the portable
media player (PMP) applications.
Although the reference 1 antenna may have a larger 10-dB
bandwidth measured from 1.74 up to 20 GHz, the proposed
antenna has demonstrated a wide 14-dB operating band-
width from 5.4 to 12.5 GHz . Notably,
to allow a much larger tolerance in impedance matching
when encountering an adverse changing environment, such
as placing the antenna near to a human head, metal desk, or
metal device [12], [13], it is always a good practice to allow Fig. 4. Measured radiation patterns in two principal planes at (a) 1.7, (b) 3.0,
the bandwidth of the antenna to operate below the 14-dB (c) 6.0, and (d) 9.0 GHz.
return-loss threshold. Furthermore, such specification is also
dedicated for outdoor propagation in the UWB system. Hence,
the proposed antenna (with 5.4–12.5 GHz below the 14-dB
return-loss threshold) is suitable for operation in the direct
sequence (DS) at high band (5.825–10.6 GHz) and multiband
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM)
at higher eleven subcarrier bands (5.9–10.6 GHz) for UWB
outdoor propagation [1].
To ensure equitable comparison between the proposed an-
tenna and the antennas design studied [2]–[6] (all reference an-
tennas cover the UWB spectrum), their performances such as
ratio bandwidth, 10-dB bandwidth, electrical dimension, and
BDR (unit: are compiled and presented in Table I. Al-
though the proposed antenna may not have a better ratio band-
width as compared to the references, however, good BDR of
2735 with smaller electrical dimension of is ex-
hibited. Therefore, the proposed SWB antenna can offer good Fig. 5. Simulated and measured gain variation of proposed antenna.
compact characteristic while maintaining a much smaller di-
mension than the designs in [2]–[6].
The measured far-field radiation patterns of the proposed an- electric current (with short wavelength) distribution on the pro-
tenna at 1.7, 3, 6, and 9 GHz are depicted in Fig. 4. Near om- posed antenna. Presented in Fig. 5 is the simulated and measured
nidirectional radiation characteristics are observed in the az- peak gain variation of the proposed antenna. Good agreement
imuth plane at 1.3- and 3-GHz bands. As for the upper band at between the two results is exhibited along 1–12 GHz. Here, a
6 and 9 GHz, the cross-polarization level rises with increasing raising gain from 1 to 7 dBi is measured with small fluctuation
frequency, whereby this phenomenon is due to the diversified in between frequencies.
CHEN et al.: COMPACT MONOPOLE ANTENNA FOR SUPER WIDEBAND APPLICATIONS
V. CONCLUSION
An egg-shaped SWB monopole antenna loaded with a fractal-
complementary slot into its ground plane is successfully imple-
mented with good compact characteristic. Besides exhibiting
a 10-dB bandwidth of 172% with 13.06:1 ratio bandwidth, a
14-dB bandwidth (low return loss) of 79% is also demonstrated
in the higher UWB operating bands for outdoor propagation. A
new BDR index term is also obtained here to identify the com-
pactness of the proposed antenna. The presented antenna is able
to cover both short- and long-range transmitting for ubiquitous
communication services.
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