IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

9, 2010

63

Compact Slot Antenna for UWB Applications

Chow-Yen-Desmond Sim, Member, IEEE, Wen-Tsan Chung, and Ching-Her Lee, Member, IEEE

AbstractA novel compact microstrip-fed slot antenna design is

proposed. By properly loading a notch to the open-ended T-shaped
slot and extending a small section to the microstrip feed line, multiple resonant frequencies are excited and merged to form a large
enough 10-dB return loss bandwidth (measured from 3.1 to 11.45
GHz) for ultrawideband (UWB) applications. The vital parameters
of the proposed antenna are illustrated, and a prototype is constructed and experimentally studied. The measured results show
good radiation patterns and stable signal transmission within the
band of interest.
Index TermsMicrostrip-fed, slot antenna, ultrawideband
(UWB) antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION

WING to its wide bandwidth, high data rate, and

short-range characteristics, ultrawideband (UWB) communication has been widely used in radar and miniature laptop
applications. In the future, it can also be used in a wireless
body area network (WBAN) and a wireless personal area
network (WPAN). To match these applications or network
technologies, compact antennas designed specifically for UWB
operating from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz have become more and more
attractive in recent years [1][4]. In order to achieve low
profile, cost reduction, and compactness for a UWB antenna
while preserving good antenna performances such as ease of
impedance matching, stable radiation pattern, steady gain, and
transmission characteristics, printed planar antennas (mostly of
monopole design) have been commonly proposed [2][4].
Although an alternative compact planar configuration such as
the slot design is also recommended due to its wideband characteristic, a large ground plane and a thick substrate of around
(here,
is the free-space wavelength at 3.1 GHz) are
usually necessary for such UWB antennas [5][8]. To further re(or about
duce the size of a UWB slot antenna to around
30 mm) in length, many recent designs have suggested that an
open-ended slot be embedded in a small ground plane [9][11].
In these designs, multiresonant frequencies are excited to form
a UWB via only a microstrip feed line, a strategy considered to
be novel. However, these designs require that the width of microstrip feed line be partially adjusted (increase, reduce, or cut)

Manuscript received December 18, 2009. Date of publication January 29,

2010; date of current version March 05, 2010.
C.-Y.-D. Sim is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Feng Chia
University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan (e-mail: cysim@fcu.edu.tw).
W.-T. Chung and C.-H. Lee are with the Department of Electronics Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 500, Taiwan
(e-mail: m97672004@mail.ncue.edu.tw; iecher@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.2010.2041629

Fig. 1. Geometry of the proposed UWB slot antenna. l

,w
,w
: , and w
: (Unit: mm).
l

=4

=2

=65

= = 2, = 22,
l

so as to achieve impedance matching, an action considered to

be unnecessary.
In this letter, a low-profile (around
) and compact
slot antenna designed for UWB applications
is proposed. The antenna is constructed by etching a T-shaped
open-ended slot in the ground plane that is excited by a microstrip feed line. Instead of modifying the feed structure as
in [9][11], inserting a small notch into the slot is proposed
to improve the impedance matching around the lower resonant
frequencies, while the impedance matching for the middle and
upper resonant frequencies are achieved by extending a small
section to the feed line. Further measurement shows good frequency-domain characteristics that validate the capability of the
proposed antenna in applying to any short-range and high-datarate UWB communication systems.
II. ANTENNA ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
The geometry of the proposed antenna is shown in Fig. 1. The
total dimensions of the ground plane are only 28 14.5 mm ,
which can be considered as one of the smallest UWB slot antennas found in the open literature. The antenna is fabricated
on a thin FR4 substrate of thickness 0.8 mm, with relative permittivity 4.4 and loss tangent 0.02. The T-shaped open-ended
slot is comprises two individual open-ended slots along the xand y-axes, and a small notch with dimensions 2 1.5 mm is
embedded at the right bottom corner of the latter one. At the opposite side of the ground plane, a microstrip feed line of width
1.5 mm is printed centrally along the y-axis, and at the open end
of this microstrip line, an additional feed section of dimensions
2 1.5 mm is extended along the x-axis.
A. Design Evolution
The development of the proposed UWB slot antenna stems
from the commercial software High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). With the aid of this software, the expected characteristics and performances of this proposed antenna can be thoroughly investigated, especially over the excited resonant frequencies. The design evolution of the proposed antenna and its

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=35

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

Fig. 2. (left) Design evolution of the proposed UWB slot antenna and (right)
its corresponding simulated return losses results.

corresponding simulated return loss diagram are presented in

Fig. 2. It begins with the design of Prototype A, which is a modified version of the proposed antenna discussed in [11]. In this
case, various vital parameters such as the length of the feed line
, widths, and positions of both open-ended slots ( , , ,
and ) of Prototype A are carefully selected to excite a resonant frequency at around 3 GHz so that a lower-end edge frequency of slightly less than 3.1 GHz for the designed UWB can
be achieved. As shown in Fig. 2, the resonant modes centered
around 3, 4, and 8 GHz for Prototype A are clearly mismatched,
with the exception of the 10-GHz band. Interestingly, during
the simulation process, it is realized that when the notch is inserted (by varying the vital parameter ) in the absence of the
extended feed section (Prototype B), the whole scenario is totally reversed. Although excellently matched 3-, 4-, and 8-GHz
bands are now observed, the impedance bandwidths around the
6- to 7-GHz and 10-GHz region are still slightly mismatched.
Therefore, a dual-band operation is observed from Prototype B,
whose lower and upper bands range from 3.1 to 5.7 GHz and
7.3 to 10.1 GHz, respectively. Since the Prototype B is unable
to fulfill the UWB 7.5-GHz bandwidth requirement, to resolve
this deficiency in bandwidth, further simulations on various vital
parameters are performed, which led to the discovery of the influence of parameter , the length of an extended microstrip
feed line orthogonal to the feed line (as depicted in Figs. 1
and 2). By carefully tuning this parameter
to 2 mm (for the
proposed antenna), besides exciting an additional middle resonant mode at around 6 GHz, the 10-GHz resonance is also restored with a larger bandwidth that further demonstrated a better
return loss for the upper frequencies. Interestingly, the loading
of both the notch and extended feed section does not affect the
lower-end edge frequency of the UWB, which in this case remains at 3.1 GHz.
For better understanding of the antenna parameters and their
effects on the proposed antenna, the simulated trends of all resonant frequencies and their respective input impedance as a function of the geometrical parameters of the proposed antenna are
presented in Table I. From this table, it is realized that further
increasing the length of parameter (arrow sign pointing up)
(arrow sign
will only affect the middle resonant frequency
pointing up means that will move toward higher frequencies),
while its corresponding impedance matching will also be improved (arrow sign pointing up at SWR). Although such action
will not affect the movement for the rest of the resonant frequencies (showing a sign ), impedance mismatch (arrow sign
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Fig. 3. Simulated and measured return losses of the proposed UWB slot
antenna.

TABLE I
SIMULATED TRENDS OF BOTH RESONANT FREQUENCIES AND
THEIR RESPECTIVE INPUT IMPEDANCE AS A FUNCTION OF THE
GEOMETRICAL PARAMETERS OF THE PROPOSED SLOT ANTENNA
(SIGN : SMALL OR NO VARIATION)

pointing down at SWR) are observed. The rest of the parameters

shown in Table I will not be further discussed here for brevity.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
A prototype of this proposed antenna is fabricated and measured. As depicted in Fig. 3, the measured return loss validates
well with its simulated counterpart, showing a larger bandwidth
of 8.35 GHz 115%, centered at 7.275 GHz. The measured radiand
ation patterns in two principal planesnamely, the
planesfor the five resonant frequencies ( to ) that merged
to form an UWB are presented in Figs. 48, respectively. In
these figures, it is realized that all the measured patterns resemble the simulated ones well. Nearly omnidirectional patplane and bidirectional patterns at copolarization in the
terns at cross polarization are observed in the lower bands (
to ), while the copolarization for the upper bands ( and
) shows notable differences between
and
. Furthermore, the cross-polarization pattern for
is rather insignificant, whereas has demonstrated an obvious bidirectional pattern (especially in the simulation) that in comparison is a few

SIM et al.: COMPACT SLOT ANTENNA FOR UWB APPLICATIONS

Fig. 4. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna at resonant frequency f .

65

Fig. 8. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna at resonant frequency f .

Fig. 5. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna at resonant frequency f .

Fig. 9. Measured peak gain of proposed antenna.

Fig. 6. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna at resonant frequency f .

Fig. 10. Measured group delay and jS

Fig. 7. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna at resonant frequency f .

decibals smaller than the lower bands. For the

plane, bidirectional patterns at copolarization are observed at all five frequencies. Note that the dips observed at around boresight direction (measured copolarization) could be due to the fact that
the feed line is printed directly behind the horizontal slot (along
, it is susthe y-axis). As for the dips observed at around
pected to be due to blocking by the cable connected to the antenna during measurement.
Fig. 9 shows the measured peak gain of the proposed antenna
at various frequencies, which demonstrated an increasing peak
gain variation from 2.6 to 4.5 dBi when measured from 3 to
9 GHz. A slight reduction in gain after 9 GHz could be due to a
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of proposed antenna.

drop in the antennas efficiency at the higher end of the X-band.

Note that these measurements were performed in an anechoic
chamber, whereby the peak gain for each displayed frequency
is selected from either principal planes of the radiation patterns
(whichever is the largest).
To ensure distortionless transmission for UWB pulses, it is essential for any UWB antennas to maintain a constant and stable
group delay with respect to frequency. Therefore, two identical
proposed antennas are orientated in copolarized (y-axis direction) face-to-face and side-by-side manners, as shown in Fig. 10,
using
for measuring the group delay and transmission gain
an Anritsu 37269C vector network analyzer (VNA). Because
of the small output power of the VNA and the lack of a power
amplifier, both antennas are thus arranged within a close proximity. In this figure, although the variation of the side-by-side
orientation is different from the face-to-face orientation due to

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

the distortion observed in the radiation pattern resulted from

an irregular mode transition in the antenna, nonetheless, the
group delays for both orientations show a variation of less than
a nanosecond, while their corresponding transmission characteristics are also fairly flat within the band of interest.
IV. CONCLUSION
A small-size microstrip-fed slot antenna for UWB operation
is proposed and successfully implemented. Wide operating
bandwidth is achieved by unifying five resonant frequencies,
whereby impedances matching are accomplished by loading
a small notch and extending a microstrip feed section. The
proposed antenna design is simple, and its performances have
fulfilled the requirement set by UWB communications, making
the application of the proposed antenna in future UWB systems
possible.
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