Techniques for

Bandwidth Enhancement of Printed Antennas

Compiled by Aitzaz Ahmed Asad Ali Shah Mazhar uddin Shahid Iqbal

Presented to Dr. Shahid Bashir

Department Of Electrical Engineering

University of Engineering & Technology Peshawar.

Our Objective:
The modern trends in wireless communication systems require wide bandwidth antennas, by which the voice, data, and video information can be transmitted. Some of these wireless communication system applications include fixed broadband local multipoint communication services, small mobile units such as cellular phones or other hand held units, laptops and various remote-sensing devices. Most of these applications require miniaturized antennas. The need for increasing the information transfer rate also demands bandwidth enhancement without sacrificing the performance. These requirements put together provide a challenging list of specifications that demand innovation in antenna design beyond known conventional techniques. Below are some of the techniques which can be employed to enhance bandwidth of microstrip antennas.

Bandwidth Enhancement by using fork-like tuning stub

The above figure (a) is the proposed design of antenna fed by a microstrip line with a fork-like tuning stub. The fork-like tuning stub is all positioned within the slot region in the opposite side of the printed wide slot. Through proper selection of the parameters of the fork-like tuning stub, it can be expected that the coupling between the microstrip line and the printed wide slot can be controlled more effectively, which makes possible significant bandwidth enhancement of the printed wide-slot antenna. The obtained impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna can reach nearly about ten times that of a conventional microstrip-line-fed printed wide-slot antenna with a simple tuning stub. For comparison, the geometry of a conventional microstrip-line-fed printed wide slot antenna with a simple tuning stub is depicted in Fig. (b) below

Reference :
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 49, NO. 7, JULY 2001

Jia-Yi Sze, Member, IEEE, and Kin-Lu Wong, Senior Member, IEEE

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 Bandwidth Enhancement of a Printed Wide-Slot Antenna With a Rotated Slot

A printed wide-slot antenna fed by a microstrip line with a rotated slot for bandwidth enhancement is proposed. By choosing a proper rotation angle with respect to the center of square wide slot, it can be expected that another resonant mode operating near one of the conventional wideslot antenna can be obtained. Hence within the operating bandwidth, two resonant modes having similar slot radiation patterns and the same polarization planes makes significant bandwidth enhancement of the proposed wide-slot antenna possible. It is expected that the measured

impedance bandwidth (defined by 10 dB return loss) can reach an operating bandwidth of 2.2 GHz at operating frequencies around 4.5 GHz, which is about four times that of a conventional microstrip-linefed printed wide-slot antenna. The figure above is of proposed design. Reference : IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION,
VOL. 53, NO. 6, JUNE 2005 By Jen-Yea Jan and Jia-Wei Su

------------------------------------------------ Bandwidth Enhancement of Printed E-Shaped Slot Antennas Fed by CPW and Microstrip Line
Two printed wide-slot antennas with E-shaped patches and slots, for broadband communication systems are presented. The one fed by a microstrip line has a bandwidth from 2.85 to 15.12 GHz (bandwidth over 136%) for S11 < -10 dB, and the other fed by a CPW line from 2.83 GHz to 18.2 GHz (bandwidth more than 146%). The impedance bandwidths of the proposed slot antennas also cover the whole FCC defined UWB frequency band (3.110.6 GHz). Although the modification includes only a rounding off of the corners of the antenna, it is expected that this will create a big improvement in the bandwidth. The proposed slot antennas have wide operation bandwidths, high gains, low cross polarizations, and small sizes. By properly choosing the suitable slot shape, selecting suitable feed patch shape and tuning their dimensions, a large operating bandwidth is obtained. In order to achieve wider operation bandwidth both of the designed antennas have four round corners on the wide slot and patch. Moreover, by rounding the end portions of the branches of the E-shaped slots and feed patches, the bandwidths of the proposed antennas are largely enhanced.

Geometry of the proposed antenna fed by a 50 microstrip line. (a) Top view (b) Side view.

Geometry of the proposed antenna fed by a 50 CPW (a) Top view. (b) Side view

Reference: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND

PROPAGATION, VOL. 58, NO. 4, APRIL 2010

By Aliakbar Dastranj and Habibollah Abiri

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 Bandwidth Enhancement based on Photonic Band Gap (PGB) concept

A technique for gain and bandwidth enhancement of patch antennas based on the concept of photonic band-gap (PBG) structures is proposed. By surrounding the patch antenna with a square-lattice of small metal pads with grounding vias, we observe a substantial suppression of surface waves excited in the dielectric substrate, which not only improves the antenna gain or effective radiated power (ERP), but also increases significantly its frequency bandwidth. Reduction in mutual coupling and cosite interference are some other potential benefits of the newly proposed PBG antenna.

Fig. 1 shows the schematic of the proposed PBG patch antenna surrounded by a square lattice of metal pads with grounding vias. A distinctive stopband exists for frequencies above the resonance of the two-dimensional PBG lattice. As a result, surface waves excited in the

dielectric substrate will be suppressed, and improvement in both radiation efficiency and beam patterns can be expected. Research by:
Yongxi Qian, Dan Sievenpiper, Vesna Radisic, Eli Yablonovitch and Tatsuo Itoh Department of Electrical Engineering University of California, Los Angeles

----------------------------------------------- A Small Wideband Microstrip-fed Monopole Antenna

A small microstip-fed monopole antenna which consists of a rectangular patch and a truncated ground plane for ultra wideband applications. To achieve the maximum impedance bandwidth, a pair of notches is placed at the two lower corners of the patch and the notch structure is embedded in the truncated ground plane.

Figure shows the configuration of the proposed wideband antenna. The proposed antenna has a simple configuration and is easy to fabricate. To obtain the wide bandwidth, the sizes of notches at the two lower corners of the patch and notch on the truncated ground plane can be optimized by parametric analysis. The designed antenna is expected to satisfy the 10 dB return loss requirement from 3.1 to 11 GHz and would provide good monopole-like radiation patterns. The proposed antenna could be a good candidate for hand-held UWB application. Reference: IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL.
15, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2005

By Jihak Jung, Wooyoung Choi, and Jaehoon Choi, Member, IEEE

----------------------------------------------- A Bandwidth Enhancement for Mobile Handset Antennas Using Wavetraps

The impedance bandwidth of a terminal antenna can be enhanced by connecting resonant short circuit transmission lines (called wavetraps) to the long sides of the terminal ground plane. The wavetraps consume minimum area/volume and can be applied to any already designed antenna element and PCB layout in an ad-hoc fashion. The technique is intended not to disturb the performance at lower frequencies (for dualband applications) significantly, and can be used together with other typical bandwidth enhancement methods. Reference: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL.
54, NO. 8, AUGUST 2006 By Peter Lindberg and Erik jefors, Student Member, IEEE

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 BANDWIDTH ENHANCEMENT OF MICROSTRIP

LINE FED PRINTED WIDE SLOT ANTENNA WITH A FRACTAL SHAPED SLOT:
By simply etching the wide slot as fractal shapes of different iteration order and iteration factors, it is found that the other resonant mode operating near the one of the conventional wide slot antenna can be obtained. It is also found that the distance between these two resonance frequencies becomes nearer when the iteration order and iteration factors of the fractal shaped increased. So by properly selecting properly iteration order and iteration factor, significant bandwidth enhancement of proposed wide slot antenna is possible. Experimental result indicate that the impedance bandwidth, defined by 10dB reflection coefficient, of the proposed fractal slot antenna with 3rd iteration order can reach an operating bandwidth of 2.4 GHz which is about 3.5 times that of conventional microstrip-line fed printed wide slot of antenna.

 MICROSTRIP SQUARE RING SLOT ANTENNA FOR ULTRA WIDE BAND APPLICATION:
A Research by: S. Sadat, M.Fardis, F.Geran etc. The MSRSA for ultra wide band of frequencies, the structure is fed with single microstrip line with a fork like tuning stub. By splitting square ring slot antenna (SRSA), and optimization of feeding network, the required impedance is achieved over the UBM frequency range (3.1 to 10.6 GHz). Below diagram show the structure of one split square ring slot in the ground plane of dielectric substrate. A SSRSA could be considered as the combination of a no. of narrow slot radiators which are connected together, so that it could provide a couple resonance at different frequencies. The split in one arm actually increase the number of resonance by introducing new resonant length. This structure is fed by single microstrip line with fork like tuning stub. This feed mechanism also produce more resonance frequencies due to fictitious short circuit which appear near the microstrip feed.

It is the SRSA which has been split on the feed side of slot ring. The SSRSA is considered on a 0.5mm RO4003B substrate with a dielectric constant equal to 3.4. the ground plane size is Lg* Wg=120mm*100mm and the length of split (S) is one of important significant parameter to obtain the required impedance bandwidth.

----------------------------------------------- A BROADBAND CPW FED STRIP LOADED SQUARE SLOT ANTENNA:

A Research by: Jyh Ying Chiou, Jia Yi ..
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 51, NO. 4, APRIL 2003

A broadband design of a coplanar waveguide square slot antenna loaded with conducting strip is proposed and it is expected that for impedance bandwidth (determined for -10dB return loss) of the proposed antenna can be greater than 60%. The structure for antenna is simply introducing four metallic strips to be protruded from the four slot corners into the slot center as show the figure below. The proposed antenna has single layer metallic structure and is printed on a dielectric substance of thickness h and relative permittivity r. The printed square slot has a side length of L. A 50 CPW having a single strip of thickness Wf and gap distance of g between the signal strip and coplanar ground plane is used to capacitively excite the square slot.

For achieving efficient excitation and good impedance matching the signal strip of the CPW should be protruded into the square slot, the length of the protruded signal strip is denoted by as l2 here. Experiment also show that the length l2 has a significant effect on the impedance bandwidth of CPW capacitively coupled square slot antenna, the optimal length l2 is found to be about 0.45 to 0.61 times the slots side length (L). By further incorporating the loading of four metallic strips of the same dimension length (l1 with 1mm and width 1mm), protruded from

the four corners of the square slot to the slot center, it is found that a large impedance bandwidth can be obtained. From the experiment the optimal bandwidth of metallic strip for bandwidth enhancement is determined to be about 0.6 to 0.8l2. by following the obtained simple design rules (l2 about 0.45 to 0.61L, and l1 about 0.6 to 0.8l2), bandwidth enhancement of a CPW fed square slot antenna is obtained.

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