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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 6, 2007

Simple Broadband Planar CPW-Fed Quasi-Yagi Antenna

H. K. Kan, Member, IEEE, R. B. Waterhouse, Senior Member, IEEE, A. M. Abbosh, and M. E. Bialkowski, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractIn this letter, we present a novel coplanar waveguide fed quasi-Yagi antenna with broad bandwidth. The uniqueness of this design is due to its simple feed selection and despite this, its achievable bandwidth. The 10 dB return loss bandwidth of the antenna is 44% covering X-band. The antenna is realized on a high dielectric constant substrate and is compatible with microstrip circuitry and active devices. The gain of the antenna is 7.4 dBi, the front-to-back ratio is 15 dB and the nominal efciency of the radiator is 95%. Index TermsBroadband antennas, coplanar waveguide feed, microstrip antennas, planar antenna, quasi-Yagi antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION LANAR quasi-Yagi antenna have received renewed interest recently due to its suitability for a wide range of application such as wireless communication systems, power combining, phased arrays, active arrays as well as millimeter-wave imaging arrays. Various designs of the planar quasi-Yagi antenna has been reported in the literature covering the X-band of the frequency spectrum [1][3]. In each of the design, the driver and the director element are similar, however, the most obvious distinction is the feeding mechanism employed. Typical feeding methods utilized include a microstrip feed [1], [2] or a coplanar waveguide (CPW) feed [3] each requiring a balun to transform the transmission line mode at the input port of the antenna to the coplanar stripline. Each of these has its own merits; however, the common major drawback is the feed of each requires a relatively complicated balun that not only increases the size of the structure, but can also degrade the radiation performance of the antenna. Recently, an attempt to alleviate this complication with a simplied feed and modied printed Yagi antenna was presented [4] and resulted in similar performance in terms of its bandwidth, radiation properties and gain to the previously reported congurations. Here, the feeding structure consisted of a microstrip line that transitions to a transmission line formed by two parallel strips. One side of the driver element is connected to the feed while the other

Fig. 1. Conguration of the proposed coplanar waveguide-fed quasi-Yagi antenna.

side of the driver element is connected to the ground connected via a coplanar stripline. Although, this feeding technique and driver conguration does not require a balun, it necessitates two side of the substrate to be etched. In this letter, we present a coplanar waveguide-fed quasi-Yagi antenna. The antenna utilizes a simple CPW feed, therefore, alleviating the complicated feeding network commonly required for the design of quasi-Yagi antenna. In addition, the proposed antenna is on a single layer and is very compact. The 10 dB return loss bandwidth of the antenna is 44% operating from 7.7 to 12 GHz covering X-band. II. CONFIGURATION AND DESIGN STRATEGY A schematic of the proposed antenna is shown in Fig. 1. As can be seen from the gure, the antenna consists of two director elements, a driven element and a ground plane acting as a reector. The antenna is fed by a CPW transmission line and as can be seen from Fig. 1 there is no complicated balun for matching the driven element to the antenna feedline. As a starting point to designing the antenna, the length of the driven while the lengths of the direcelement should be around according to the Yagi tors should be in the order of refers to the effective wavedesign principles [5]. Here, length at the lowest frequency of operation. It is calculated assuming the following value for the effective dielectric constant , where is the dielectric of the substrate;

Manuscript received September 26, 2006; revised December 1, 2006. H. K. Kan is with the School of Engineering and Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of the South Pacic, Suva, Fiji (e-mail: hingkan@ieee.org). R. B. Waterhouse is with the Pharad, Baltimore, MD 21227 USA. A. M. Abbosh is with the College of Electronic Engineering, Mosul University, Iraq. He is also with the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia. M. E. Bialkowski is with the School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia. Color versions of Figs. 15 are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2006.890751

1536-1225/$25.00 2007 IEEE

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KAN et al.: SIMPLE BROADBAND PLANAR CPW-FED QUASI-YAGI ANTENNA

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Fig. 2. Photograph of the developed X-band prototype antenna.

Fig. 4. Measured radiation patterns of the antenna in the x-z and y-z planes at 10 GHz.

Fig. 3. Return loss performance of the antenna.

constant of the substrate. The distance between the directors . In order to develop a comshould be between 0.1 to . The design frequency pact antenna we chose the value for the proposed antenna is 8 GHz which results in the following initial values of the antenna parameters assuming the ): substrate to be Rogers RT6010 (0.64 mm, mm, mm, mm. The commercial package, Ansoft HFSSv9.2 based on a 3-D full-wave nite element method (FEM) was then utilized in assisting to optimize the proposed antenna for wide bandwidth covering the X-band. The antenna was optimized after simulamm, tion and the following dimensions were selected: mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, and mm. In this optimized quasi-Yagi design, the antenna operates from 8 GHz to 12 GHz. As can be seen from Fig. 1, the novelty of the proposed quasi-Yagi antenna is its simplicity in its feed structure while still achieving its broad bandwidth and directive radiation properties. To the authors knowledge, this is the simplest planar quasi-Yagi ever reported. As the is dedistance between the reector and the driven element creased, the resonant frequency of the antenna is lowered albeit

Fig. 5. Measured gain of the antenna.

at the cost of reduced bandwidth. It is interesting to note that performs the task of a balun, therefore allevithe distance ating the need for the complicated balun commonly required. The total area of the substrate is approximately (where is the free-space wavelength) at the central frequency. The antenna was manufactured and tested experimentally. Fig. 2 shows the photograph of the developed X-band prototype antenna including the SMA connector used to interface the antenna to the test equipment. As can be seen from the photograph, the ground-planes of the CPW transmission are connected via the SMA adaptor. III. RESULTS Fig. 3 shows the simulated and measured return loss of the proposed coplanar waveguide-fed quasi-Yagi antenna. As can be seen from the plot, the antenna operates from 7.7 to 12 GHz covering the required X-band. The simulated result closely resembles the measured result at the lower and upper resonant frequency validating the design of the antenna. However, slight

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20

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 6, 2007

discrepancy can be observed at the ripples due to the SMA connector not being included in the simulation. The far-eld radiation patterns were measured in an anechoic chamber and the two principal planes, E- and H-copolarized patterns for 10 GHz are shown in Fig. 4. It should be noted that the radiation patterns for 8 GHz and 12 GHz shows similar characteristic. The cross polarization elds of the antenna exhibits omni-directional patterns and for brevity are not shown in the plots. As can be seen from this plots in Fig. 4, there is directivity for both the co-polarized plane (note that broadside is 0 degrees on the plots) with a front-to-back ratio of 15 dB. Fig. 5 shows the measured gain of the CPW-fed quasi-Yagi for frequencies from 8 to 12 GHz. The peak gain of the antenna is 7.4 dBi measured at 10 GHz. The efciency of the antenna is 95% over the whole band. IV. CONCLUSION A CPW-fed antenna has been presented. The antenna is one of the simplest forms of a planar quasi-Yagi and it does not require

any complicated balun structure and is also uniplanar. The 10 dB return loss bandwidth of the antenna is 44% and the measured gain varies between 3.47.4 dBi across the impedance matched bandwidth. The front-to-back ratio of the antenna was measured as 15 dB. The antenna is small in size indicating that it is a good candidate for phased arrays. REFERENCES
[1] W. R. Deal, N. Kaneda, J. Sor, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, A new quasi-yagi antenna for planar active antenna arrays, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 48, pp. 910916, Jun. 2000. [2] N. Kaneda, W. R. Deal, Y. Qian, R. Waterhouse, and T. Itoh, A broadband planar quasi-yagi antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 50, pp. 11581160, Aug. 2002. [3] J. Sor, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, Coplanar waveguide fed quasi-yagi antenna, Electron. Lett., vol. 36, pp. 12, Jan. 2000. [4] G. Zheng, A. A. Kishk, A. W. Glisson, and A. B. Yakovlev, Simplied feed for modied printed Yagi antenna, Electron. Lett., vol. 40, pp. 464466, Apr. 2004. [5] C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory Analysis and Design, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2005, ch. 10.

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