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CATR. The design procedure, based on the one-dimensional quasi-optical approach, despite of its simplicity and approximations that are made regarding the internal lens reections, is quite efcient for computing the sectorial lens prole. The axisymmetry of the lens makes it easy, in principle, to fabricate. Nevertheless the choice of the dielectric material is important since it has to be compatible with the milling technique for ensuring a good surface quality of nish. Therefore, polyurethane material is preferred to PVC. Very good agreement has been obtained between measurements and simulations carried out with SRSRD. This is a key point because the lens design procedure neglects some important lens features such as the internal reections or step shadowing. From this knowledge, we can perform quite accurate simulations using SRSRD. The above-mentioned effects were quantied and their inuences on the nal CATR setup were studied.

[16] R. Leberer and W. Menzel, A dual planar reectarray with synthesized phase and amplitude distribution, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 11, pp. 35343539, Nov. 2005. [17] [Online]. Available: www.scilab.org [18] J. Lanteri, C. Migliaccio, J.-Y. Dauvignac, and Ch. Pichot, Reectarray using a prolate feed at 94 GHz, in Proc. IEEE AP-S, San Diego, Jul. 511, 2008, pp. 14. [19] M. Multari, C. Migliaccio, J.-Y. Dauvignac, L. Brochier, J.-L. Le Sonn, Ch. Pichot, W. Menzel, and J.-L. Desvilles, Investigation of low-cost compact range W-band, in Proc. EuCAP, Nice, Nov. 610, 2006, pp. 16. [20] R. C. Rudduck and C. L. J. Chen, New plane wave spectrum formulation for the near-eld of circular apertures, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 438449, Jul. 1976.

REFERENCES
[1] S. Qi and K. Wu, Leakage and resonance characteristics of radiating cylindrical dielectric structure suitable for use as a feeder for high-efcient omnidirectional/sectorial antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 17671773, Sep. 1998. [2] T. Hirvonen, J. Tuovinen, and A. V. Risnen, Lens-type compact antenna test range at mm-waves, in Proc. 21st Eur. Microw. Conf., Stuttgart, Germany, Oct. 1991, vol. 2, pp. 10791083. [3] B. D. Nguyen, C. Migliaccio, Ch. Pichot, K. Yalmamoto, and N. Yonemoto, W-band fresnel zone plate reector for helicopter collision avoidance radar, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 14521456, May 2007. [4] W. Mayer, M. Meilchen, W. Grabherr, P. Nchter, and R. Ghl, Eight channel 77 GHz front-end module with high-performance synthesized signal generator for FM-CW sensor applications, IEEE Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 9931000, Mar. 2004. [5] E. K. Walton and J. D. Young, The Ohio state university compact range cross-section measurement range, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 32, no. 11, pp. 12181233, Nov. 1984. [6] C. W. I. Pistorius, G. C. Clerici, and W. D. Burnside, A dual chamber Gregorian subreector system for compact range applications, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 305313, Mar. 1989. [7] G. Forma, D. Dubruel, J. Marti-Canales, M. Paquay, G. Crone, J. Tauber, M. Sandri, F. Villa, and I. Ristorcelli, 30-70-100-320 GHz radiation measurements for the radio frequency qualication model of the Planck satellite, presented at the 1st Eur. Conf. on Antennas Propag., (EuCAP2006), Nice, France, Nov. 610, 2006, paper 349443. [8] J. Meltaus, J. Salo, E. Noponen, M. M. Salomaa, V. Viikari, A. Lnnqvist, T. Koskinen, J. Sily, J. Hakli, J. Ala-Laurinaho, J. Mallat, and A. V. Risnen, Millimeter-wave beam shaping using holograms, IEEE Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 12741279, Apr. 2003. [9] J. Hkli, T. Koskinen, A. Lnnqvist, J. Sily, V. Viikari, J. Mallat, J. Ala-Laurinaho, J. Tuovinen, and A. V. Risnen, Testing of a 1.5-m reector antenna at 322 GHz in a CATR based on a hologram, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 31423150, Oct. 2005. [10] A. Lnnqvist, T. Koskinen, J. Hakli, J. Sily, J. Ala-Laurinaho, J. Mallat, V. Viikari, J. Tuovinen, and A. V. Risnen, Hologram-based compact range for submillimeter-wave antenna testing, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 31513159, Oct. 2005. [11] Menzel and B. Huder, Compact range for millimeter-wave frequencies using a dielectric lens, Electron. Lett., vol. 20, pp. 768769, Sep. 1984. [12] G. Bruhat, Optique. France: Masson, 1959, 5me edition, RO30013068. [13] A. Berthon and R. Bills, Integral equation analysis for radiating structures of revolution, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 159170, Feb. 1989. [14] C. Migliaccio, J.-Y. Dauvignac, L. Brochier, J.-L. Le Sonn, and Ch. Pichot, W-band high gain lens antenna for metrology and radar applications, Electron. Lett., vol. 40, no. 22, pp. 13941396, Oct. 28, 2004. [15] A. P. Pavacic, D. L. Del Rio, J. R. Mosig, and G. V. Eleftheriades, Three dimensional ray tracing theory to model internal reections in off-axis lens antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 604612, Feb. 2006.

A Single-Layer Ultrawideband Microstrip Antenna

Qi Wu, Ronghong Jin, and Junping Geng

AbstractA single-layer microstrip antenna for ultrawideband (UWB) applications, in which an array of rectangular microstrip patches was arranged in the log-periodic way and proximity-coupled to the microstrip feeding line, is presented. In order to reduce the number of microstrip patches in the UWB log-periodic arrays, a large scale factor k = 1 1 was rstly reported and proved to be highly effective. Furthermore, instead of using an absorbing terminal loading, a novel loss-free compensating stub was proposed. Detailed parameters study was also presented for better understanding of the proposed antennas. The impedance bandwidth (mea2 5) of an example antenna with only 11 elements is sured VSWR from 2.266.85 GHz with a ratio of about 3.03:1. Both numerical and experimental results show that the proposed antenna has stable directional radiation patterns, very low-prole and low fabrication cost, which are suitable for various broadband applications. Index TermsDirectional antennas, log-periodic antennas, microstrip antennas, ultrawideband (UWB) antennas.

I. INTRODUCTION Currently, there are increasing demands for novel ultrawideband (UWB) antennas with low-prole structures and constant directional radiation patterns for both commercial and military applications [1], [2]. Unfortunately, most of the mature UWB antennas like equiangular and Archimedean spirals [3], planar monopoles [4], [5] and wide slot antennas [6], [7] have inherently bi-directional or omnidirectional radiation patterns, which were unsuitable for conformal placement on certain platforms. Cavity-backed log-periodic slot antennas [8] could be integrated compactly into various aircrafts, but they could only provide end-re radiation patterns and have somewhat high prole. On the other hand, microstrip antennas have some attractive merits like very low-prole and broadside radiation patterns with medium gains, which have been considered as excellent conformal radiators [9] for a long time. However, a traditional single-element microstrip antenna has inherently narrow impedance bandwidth. In the 1980s, the
Manuscript received January 06, 2009; revised May 10, 2009. First published July 14, 2009; current version published January 04, 2010. The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China (e-mail: wuqi_2004@sjtu.edu. cn). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TAP.2009.2027728

0018-926X/$26.00 2009 IEEE

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series-fed log-periodic microstrip antennas (LPMAs) were rstly introduced for bandwidth enhancement [10], [11]. After that, other feeding structures like =4-microstrip feeding [12], [13], direct feeding with vias [14], slot-coupled feeding [15], inset feeding [16] for LPMAs were also reported. However, all of the LPMAs mentioned above were based on the combination of two substrate layers, in which very accurate collocation between the two layers were required. A UWB traveling-wave LPMA was usually terminated by a matched load to absorb the terminal energy and prevent reections from the end of feeding line, which could improve its impedance matching and radiation patterns considerably at the band edges. However, the absorbing loads could remarkably degrade the efciency of LPMAs over their operating bandwidths, especially at the band edges by the order of 10 % or more [10]. It is also well known that the operating bandwidth of a LPMA could be determined by the scale factor k [10] and the number of microstrip elements n, in a simple expression as kn01 . Therefore, for the LMPA with a small scale factor, a large number of microstrip patches were required to achieve ultrawide operating bandwidth and make the antenna unacceptably large. Obviously, the number of elements in a UWB LMPA could be signicantly reduced with a larger scale factor. For example, with a scale factor k as 1.05 or below like the reported LPMAs in [10][16], about 21 elements were needed to achieve a 2.6:1 bandwidth; however, for the LMPA with a scale factor k as 1.1, 11 microstrip elements could be enough for the same bandwidth with a size reduction of over 40%. This communication presents a single-layer proximity-coupled logperiodic microstrip antenna for UWB applications. A large scale factor as 1.1 for UWB LPMAs is rstly reported and discussed. A novel loss-free compensating stub is also proposed for the termination and bandwidth enhancement of the proposed antennas. The conguration of the proposed LPMA is described in Section II. Numerical results are presented in Section III for better understanding of this antenna, while the measured results are presented and discussed in Section IV. This communication is concluded in Section V. II. ANTENNA CONFIGURATION The proposed single-layer LPMA, as illustrated in Fig. 1, was composed of a 50
100
impedance transition, a 100-
microstrip feeding line and an array of proximity-coupled rectangular microstrip patches, which were all etched on a Teon-based substrate with a relative permittivity of 2.65 and a thickness of 3 mm. The microstrip elements were arranged in a transposed log-periodic way with the same coupling gap G. The log-periodic scale factor k was dened as

Fig. 1. Structural conguration of the proposed LPMA and the coordinate system. TABLE I OPTIMIZED PARAMETERS OF THE PROPOSED LPMA WITH COMPENSATING STUB

Fig. 2. Simulated reection coefcient and antenna efciency of the proposed antennas with compensating stubs at the reference plane BB (k = 1:1).

k=

Wi Li Di;i+1 = = : Wi01 Li01 Di01;i

(1)

In (1), Di;i+1 was the center distance between patch Pi+1 and Pi ; Wi and Li were respectively the width and length of the patch Pi . The proposed LPMA was terminated by a novel compensating stub with length T, instead of a matched load or open-circuit. The LPMAs were designed by a semi-empirical way like the design procedure of LPDAs [3] except some parameters of the LPMAs should be optimized with the assistance of full-wave simulator HFSS. Following discussions of the proposed LPMAs were all based on the optimized parameters in Table I. III. NUMERICAL RESULTS Coupling gap G between the microstrip patches and the microstrip feeding line could determine the power transmission efciency of the feeding line thus should be carefully optimized. Fig. 2 shows the simulated results of the proposed LPMA at the reference plane BB0 (see

Fig. 1), and the inuence of the coupling gap G on the impedance matching and antenna efciency could be easily observed. The antenna with G = 0 mm was no longer a travelling-wave array and exhibited a multiresonant behavior. The antennas with G = 0:2 mm and G = 0:4 mm, which could be respectively referred as critical coupled and under coupled [17], have very similar reection coefcient and efciency above 2.55 GHz because the last several microstrip patches could absorb the residual energy which was not properly coupled to the corresponding patches due to the under coupled effects. So, it is not surprising to nd that the critical coupled one was better impedance matched in the band from 2.252.55 GHz than the under coupled one because this frequency band corresponds to the last microstrip elements PN . The characteristics of compensating stubs with positive or negative T value were different: when the stub went beyond the last patch PN (known as positive T), the stub was actually an open-circuit microstrip stub and behaved like a loss-free series capacitive load, the stub with negative T could be considered as a loss-free series inductive load. The compensating effects of the stub could be clearly observed by examining the simulated input impedance of the proposed LPMAs at the reference plane BB0 as shown in Fig. 3. The input impedance of the proposed antenna without compensating (T = 0 mm) was heavily

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Fig. 4. Simulated and measured VSWR and gain of the proposed antennas with compensating and absorbing terminations (k = 1:1). Fig. 3. Simulated input impedance of the proposed antennas with compensating stubs at the reference plane BB (k = 1:1).

capacitive just after its rst resonant frequency at 2.36 GHz. The capacitive components were well compensated by the series inductive load (T = 04 mm), and thus the impedance matching was significantly improved; but the situation got worse if the series capacitive load (T = 4 mm) was applied. After the rst resonant frequency, the inuence of different stub T was very slight, thus it could be observed that the antennas were all well impedance matched. The performance of two identical LPMAs with the compensating and absorbing loads could be also evaluated and compared. The absorbing load was assumed to be positioned beyond the last patch PN with T = 24 mm and set as a Lumped RLC boundary with 100-
resistance and a dimension of 2.4 2 3.0 mm2 in HFSS. Generally both of the antennas were well impedance matched in the frequency band between 2.4 and 6.8 GHz as shown in Fig. 4. In the frequency band below 2.3 GHz, the one with an absorbing load still has good VSWR for its terminal load could absorb all of the residual energy and prevent possible terminal reections, which also signicantly degrades its efciency as shown in Table II. The radiation patterns of the LPMAs with compensating and absorbing loads were very similar in the frequency band above 3.3 GHz as shown in Fig. 5. But the patterns have some differences in the x-z plane at 2.3 GHz, in which the pattern of the one with absorbing load has narrower beamwidth and higher directivity. That difference was mainly caused by the different dealing methods of the residual energy: for the absorbing load, all of the residual energy was absorbed at the terminal, thus good radiation patterns could be observed; for the compensating case, the residual energy was totally reected at the termination, thus some disordered modes of patch PN appeared and the patterns were also inuenced. Furthermore, although the LPMA with absorbing load has higher directivity below 3.3 GHz, its gain is obviously lower than the one with compensating stub for its extremely low efciency. In addition, the performance of the LPMAs with k = 1:05 should also be examined. The simulated impedance bandwidth of the LPMA with k = 1:05, dened by VSWR < 2:5, was from 3.356.95 GHz. The radiation patterns and gain of the proposed LPMA with k = 1:05 were respectively illustrated in Fig. 5 and Table II. Generally the two LPMAs with k = 1:05 and k = 1:1 have very similar radiation patterns, and the one with k = 1:05 has higher directivity, 0.65 dB on average, than the one with k = 1:1, which shows the similar trend as the log-periodic dipole array (LPDA) [18] and could be considered as the main cost of large scale factor. Besides, the trend of patch gap D1;2 was also found to comply with the best design curve for LPDAs, and

Fig. 5. Simulated radiation patterns of the proposed LPMAs with compensating and absorbing stubs: (a) x-z plane, compensating stub, k = 1:1; (b) x-z plane, absorbing stub, k = 1:1; (c) y-z plane, compensating stub, k = 1:1; (d) y-z plane, absorbing stub, k = 1:1; (e) x-z plane, compensating stub, k = 1:05; (f) y-z plane, compensating stub, k = 1:05.

thus the well-established theory of LPMAs could be an important guidance in the design of LPMAs. IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION An example antenna with k = 1:1 was fabricated based on the optimized parameters in Table I. The impedance bandwidth was measured by using an Agilent 8722ES Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) and the

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TABLE II SIMULATED DIRECTIVITY, GAIN AND EFFICIENCY OF THE PROPOSED LPMAS

as the standard antenna, and the results could be found in Fig. 4. The simulated gains agree reasonably with the measured one, and the differences between them may be caused by the numerical errors and the calibration errors of the UWB standard horn. The gain bandwidth, dened by the simulated and measured gain better than 6.5 dB, was from 2.46.6 GHz with a radio bandwidth 2.75:1. In its gain bandwidth, the uctuations of simulated and measured gain were also small and evaluated to be 2.42.0 dB, respectively. V. CONCLUSION A single-layer log-periodic microstrip antenna for UWB applications was presented. A large scale factor k = 1:1 was rstly reported and proved to be highly effective for the purpose of size reduction. Furthermore, instead of using an absorbing terminal loading, a novel loss-free compensating stub was also proposed. The impedance bandwidth (with measured VSWR < 2:5) of the example antenna with only 11 elements is from 2.266.85 GHz with a ratio of about 3.03:1. Both numerical and experimental results show that the proposed antenna has stable directional radiation patterns, very low-prole and low fabrication cost, which are suitable for various broadband applications.

REFERENCES
[1] Z. N. Chen, M. J. Ammann, X. Qing, X. H. Wu, T. S. P. See, and A. Cai, Planar antenna, IEEE Microw. Mag., vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 6373, Dec. 2006. [2] J. M. Bell, M. F. Iskander, and J. J. Lee, Ultrawideband hybrid EBG/ Ferrite ground plane for low-prole array antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 412, Jan. 2007. [3] J. D. Karus and R. J. Marhefka, Antennas for All Applications. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. [4] N. P. Agrawall, G. Kumar, and K. P. Ray, Wideband planar antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 294295, Feb. 1998. [5] M. J. Ammann and Z. N. Chen, A wideband shorted planar monopole with bevel, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 901903, Apr. 2003. [6] J. Y. Sze and K. L. Wong, Bandwidth enhancement of a microstripline fed printed wide-slot antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 47, no. 7, pp. 10201024, July 2001. [7] J. Lao, R. H. Jin, J. P. Geng, and Q. Wu, An ultra-wideband microstrip elliptical slot antenna excited by a circular patch, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 845846, Apr. 2008. [8] A. G. Roederer, A log-periodic cavity-backed slot array, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 756758, Nov. 1973. [9] D. M. Pozar, Microstrip antennas, Proc. IEEE, vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 7991, Jan. 1992. [10] P. S. Hall, New wideband microstrip antenna using log-periodic technique, Electron. Lett., vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 127128, 1980. [11] P. S. Hall, Multi-octave bandwidth log-periodic microstrip antenna array, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Microw., Antennas Propag., vol. 133, no. 2, pt. H, pp. 127136, 1986. [12] H. Pues, J. Bogaers, R. Pieck, and A. van de Capelle, Wideband quasi log-periodic microstrip antennas, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Microw., Antennas Propag., vol. 128, no. 3, pt. H, pp. 159163, 1981. [13] R. Kakkar and G. Kumar, Stagger tuned microstrip log-periodic antenna, in IEEE AP-S Int. Symp. Digest, Jun. 1996, pp. 12621265. [14] H. Ozeke, S. Hayashi, N. Kikuma, and N. Inagaki, Quasi-log-periodic microstrip antenna with closely coupled elements, Elect. Eng., vol. 132, no. 2, pp. 5864, 2000, in Japan. [15] H. K. Smith and P. E. Mayes, Log-periodic array of dual-feed microstrip patch antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 39, no. 12, pp. 16591664, 1991. [16] M. K. A. Rahim, M. N. A. Karim, T. Masri, and A. Asrokin, Comparison between straight and U shape of ultra wide band microstrip antenna using log periodic technique, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on UWB, Sep. 2007, pp. 696699. [17] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990. [18] R. Carrel, The design of log-periodic dipole antennas, IRE Int. Convention Rec., pt. 1, pp. 6175, 1961.

Fig. 6. Measured radiation patterns of the proposed antenna with compensating stub (k=1.1): (a) x-z plane; (b) y-z plane.

results were shown in Fig. 4. It shows good agreement between the simulated and measured results, and the little difference between them may be caused by the soldering effect of the SMA connector and its mechanical tolerance. Its measured impedance bandwidth dened by VSWR < 2:5 is from 2.266.85 GHz with a ratio of about 3.03:1. The radiation patterns of the example antenna were illustrated in Fig. 6. Generally, the measured patterns agree well with the simulated one, and the patterns were reasonably stable at the broadside. The gain was also measured by using the comparison method with a corrugated horn

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