A Compact Broadband Stripline-fed Slot Antenna for Array Application

Xiaoyong Shan"', Gang Liu"' ,Rajanik Mark Jayas~riya'~'

Agilis Communicarion Technologies Pte Ltd,

100 Jurong East Street 21 Level 4

Singapore Technologies Building, Singapore 609602

Email: 'I' shanry@ agilis.st.com.sg

('' liugnng @agilis.st.com.sg

('I

rajan ik @ agilis.sr. con,sg

ABSTRACT
A compact broadband striplinefed slot antenna is presented in this paper. The striplinefed slot is covered with
polytetrafluoroethytene (PTFE)-filled rectangular slot. With the PTFE-filled slot acting as an impedance transformer,
the lOdB return loss bandwidth of this antenna can be extended to be over 20%. The size of the antenna is only
0.49A,x0.29& at the center frequency of 6.1CHz. The wide bandwidth and compact size make it very suitable to be

used in C-band Mobile Satellite (MSAT) vehicle phased-array applications.

INTRODUCTION
Striplinefed slot antennas or microstnp-fed cavity backed antennas have been subjects of n umerous investigations
in recent years. These antennas have many advantages, such as low profile, simple and inexpensive to fabricate
using modem printed-circuit technology, ctc. However, there are still many problems. One of these problems is the
relative narrow bandwidth of these antennas.
Several methods have been proposed to increase the bandwidth of microstrip-fed slot or CBS antennas, such as
series radius stub 111, multi-fed structure [Z], and wide slot [3].These methods usually increase the length and width
of the slots, which makes the antennas too large to be used in phased array applications. Since the slot is backed
with metal cavity, there are no more space to put the feeding networks and circuit components directly behind the
substrate. This will increase the complicity of the feeding networks and lead to extra phase errors caused by the nonideality of the feeding networks.
Striplinefed slot antennas can be easily fed by planar microstrip or stripline feeding networks by facilitating the
modem printed-circuit technology. Without metal cavity or mode suppresser surrounding, the bandwidth can be
quite large. UnKortunately, the parallel plate mode is excited and the efficiency o f the antenna is very IOW [4]. A more
practical stripline-fed slot antenna is surrounded with cavity or via holes, as presented by Clouston and Evans [5].
The bandwidth of this antenna is narrow. Air filled stripline-fed slot antennas are reported to have wide bandwidth,
but they are mechanically complicate and cad not be fabricated using standard multi-layer PCB technology.
In this paper, a compact broadband stripiine-fed slot antenna is designed, which is optimized to be used in C-band
MSAT vehicle phased-array applications. The antenna consists of a stripline-fed slot covered with a FTFEiilled slot
(or so-called cavity). With the covering of the PTFE-filled slot, the bandwidth isidcreased greatly. Furthermore, when
in array applications, with the metal frame of the cavity presented, the mechanical strength of the antenna is improved
significantly.

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0-7803-8842-9/05/5$20.00

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IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology

DESCRlPilON OF THE A N A DESIGN
The geometry of the antenna is shown in Figure 1. A stripline-fed slot is constructed using two layers of Rogers
Ro4003 substrate. The thickness of each substrate is 0.81mm.The stripline-fed slot is covered with a PTFE-filled
rectangular slot of 2 4 m m 14mm size and 11.5mm thickness. The stripline is surrounded with via holes from top
ground to bottom ground, which form a cavity to surpress the parallel-plate mode.
The thickness of the PTFE-filled slot is selected to be around kJ4 of the F E E filled waveguide for it to act like an
impedance transformer. The stripline-fed slot and FTFE-filled slot introduce two resonant frequencies, which
increases the handwidth of the antenna.

rectangular slot

groundl to ground2
Stripline to feed the
Slot in layer groundl

(2) Side view

Figure 1. Geometry of the antenna

This antenna is designed for scanning array applications and some active components will be put directly behind the
elements. A dual polarized array and its feeding structure is shown i n Figure 2.

Ina array

boards

Microstrip line

Active circuits

Figure 2. The antenna array and its feeding structure.

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Small Antennas and Novel MetaMaterials

!3JMULATIONANDEXPERIMENTALRESULTS
r ,

The antenna is designed using Ansofts Ensemble. Our return loss target is to optimize the return loss values in the
frequency range of 5.XGHz to 6.4GHz. After optimizing the geometrical parameters of the antenna, the simulated return
loss result is obtained to be better than 20dB in this frequency range as shown in Figure 3. The simulated 15dB
return loss bandwidth of this antenna is 16% and lOdB return loss bandwidth is over 20%. Better lOdB return loss
bandwidth can be achieved if the antenna is optimized for it.
To exam the performance of a single element in the array, a nineelement array is fabricated for measurement, as
shown in Figure 4. The array consists of four Horizontal-polarized elements and five vertical-polarized elements. To
check the lSlll of a single element, the centered slot element is fed by a microstrip feed-line. The measured lSlll for the
, ~ a bit different from the
antenna is presented in Figure 3. From Figure 3 it can be found that the measured ~ . S l is
simulated one. This is mainly caused by the junction between the microstrip feeding line and the antenna. The
junction can not be well modeled in our simulation due to the limitation of the software. Together with other
mechanical fabrication errors, the measured data can be deviated from the simulation results significantly. To
eliminate the effect of this junction, a tuning stub is put on the microstrip line. The measured IS result with tuning
stub is also presented in Figure 3. It can be seen that with the tuning stub presentcd, the return loss performance
can be greatly improved. The measured 15dB return loss bandwidth after tuning is over 14% and lOdB return loss
bandwidth is 19%.

Figure 3. Simulated lSlll results.

The simulated gain of this antenna is 5.63dBi, 5.67dBi and 5.71dBi a t the frequency of5,XGHz, 6.1GHz and 6.4GH2,
respectively. The simulated cross polarization level is less than -60dB in the whole frequency range.

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IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology

--.

(2) Front view

(1) Back view

Figure 4.9-element array for IS,,[ measurement.

CONCLUSION
A compact broadband stripline-fed slot antenna is presented in this paper. Both simulated and experimental results

are presented. With the stack up structure proposed in the paper, the bandwidth of a strip line fed slot antenna can
be increased significantly. The simulated lOdB returnloss bandwidth is over 20% and can be further enhanced. The
structure of the slot is very compact, which make it a good candidate for phased array applications.

REFERENCE
[l] P. H. Rao, V. F. Fusco and R. Cahill, Linearly polarised radial stub fed high performance wideband slot antennd:

Electron. Lett., vol. 37, No. 6, pp. 335-337, March 2001.

[2] N. Behdad, and K. Sarabandi, A multiresonant singledement wideband slot antenna: IEEEAWPL Letf.,vol. 3,

pp. 5-8,2004.J.
[3] Hirokawa, H. Arai and N. Goto, Cavity-backed wide slot antenna, IEE Proc. vol. 136, pt. H, no. 1 pp. 29-31, Feb.
1989.

141 C. Chen, W. E. McKinzie, and N. G. Alexopoulos, Stripline-fed arbitrarily shaped printed-aperture antennas:
IEEETrans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 45, no. 7, pp. 1186-1198, July. 1997.
[SI E. N. Clouston, and S. Evans, X triplate stripline slot antenna developed for time-domain measurements on
phased arrays, iEEE AP-Shternational Symposium Digest, Vol. 26, pp. 312 - 315, Jun 1988.

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