DesignFeature

KANGBO TAN
Associate Professor

PING XU
Doctor

ZEHONG YAN
Professor

FANGFANG FAN
Doctor

National Laboratory of Science and Technology on Antennas and Microwaves, Xidian University, Xian, Shaanxi 710071, Peoples Republic of China; 86-29-88202662, FAX: 86-29-88202662, e-mail: [email protected].

SEQUENTIAL
THIS ANTENNA DESIGN APPROACH BUILDS A SIMPLE ARRAY FROM MICROSTRIP ANTENNA ELEMENTS, FORMING A BROADBAND CIRCULARLY POLARIZED WAVE.

ROTATION Feeds Microstrip Array M

ICROSTRIP ANTENNAS offer many benefits, including low profile, light weight, and low cost; they are fairly simple to manufacture and easy to integrate with other planar circuits. Unfortunately, microwave antennas are notoriously narrowband in nature, limiting their use for many applications. A number of approaches have been applied to overcome the inherently narrow bandwidths of microstrip antennasone dating as far back as 1985.1 That technique was based on the use of an aperture-coupled feed structure. Other attempts have involved different slot shapes in the ground plane of the microstrip antenna,2 with the result being that the antennas magnetic (H) slot has larger coupling. The current design incorporates H slots in quadrature, to obtain a wideband circular polarization wave. The H slots are fed by a Wilkinson power divider, using its 90-deg. phase-shifted outputs with the same amplitudes.

1.52 mm 10 mm 1.52 mm 10 mm

1. These different views show (l-r) the wideband microstrip antenna geometry, the top view of the antenna element, and the side view of the antenna element.
Figure 1

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MICROSTRIP ANTENNA ARRAY

In recent years, various mi100 mm crostrip antenna arrays have been designed using a sequential rotation technique, with the 90 0 deg. deg. aim of improving polarization purity, impedance matching, and pattern symmetry across wider bandwidths.3-12 These designs include the use of linearly polarized elements,3-5 circularly polarized microstrip el270 180 ements,6-10 and feed networks deg. deg. incorporating serial or parallel feeds.11,12 Such approaches can improve the circularly polarized bandwidth, but tend Figure 2 not to impact the axial ratio 2. The microstrip array antenna, with each element bandwidth. offset by 90 deg., is depicted in this layout. For example, the best results registered for axial ratio bandwidth by 90-deg. phase shift to obtain a circularly these researchers was 45%. In this case, polarized wave. After mass simulation a wideband aperture-coupled microstrip and optimization using version Ansoft antenna was employed as the basic reso- HFSS10.0 of the High-Frequency Strucnant element, although the element is ture Simulator (HFSS) finite-element also referred to as an aperture-coupled computer-aided-engineering (CAE) simmicrostrip antenna in the literature.9 It ulation software from Ansys (www.ansys. adopts a branch-line coupler to feed two com), the ultimate parameters used for orthogonally located feeds quadrature to the microstrip antenna array design are each other. The coupler has a extra load indicated in Fig. 1. port and a parasitic patch to improve the To obtain high gain and good wideimpedance bandwidth but with a penalty band circular polarization performance, of increased height. the H-slot aperture-coupled microstrip As an alternative antenna design ap- antenna was used as the basic element proach, a 4 4 circularly polarized mi- in an array. A four-element microstrip crostrip antenna array was designed us- antenna was created as a subarray ing a sequentially rotated microstrip line without any sequential rotation, and to excite the H-slot aperture-coupled mi- a quartet of four-element subarrays crostrip antenna. Wilkinson power dividers, which provide wide bandwidth and high isolation, provide the signal power division for the feed network. Hence, this microstrip antenna array achieves high gain and better wideband circular polarization characteristic than the design in ref. 9. Figure 1 shows the antenna element configuration. It consists of three layers: The upper layer is a square patch which serves as radiator; the middle layer is the ground plane with H slots in quadrature; and the lower layer is a feed network with a Wilkinson power divider featuring two 3. The fabricated broadband microstrip quadrature output arms, supplying a antenna is shown in this photograph.
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MICROSTRIP ANTENNA ARRAY

3.0:1

Measured VSWR Simulated VSWR

4. These plots show simulated and measured VSWR versus frequency for the wideband microstrip antenna.

2.5:1

2.0:1

1.5:1

1.0:1

1.0

1.2

1.4

1.6

1.8

2.0

2.2

2.4

2.6

FrequencyGHz

were then fed with a sequential rotation technique using a 90-deg phase shift Figure 4 between each other (as shown in Fig. 2). The distance between adjacent elements is 100 mm (0.670, where 0 is the

free-space wavelength of the center frequency of interest). For the sequentially rotated feed network, the feeding point to the full array is at the edge of the substrate. This is

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because the distance between the reflection board and the feed layer is just 10 mm. This is not easy for an SMA connection with probe feeding, so this structure will exhibit a little higher conductor loss due to the added microstrip line. The microstrip line feeds of the patch antenna array are arranged for a 90-deg. phase shift with respect to the neighbor with same width of 50 in spite of the 100- microstrip line used in the Wilkinson power divider. The feed network should be carefully designed to confirm that the phase shift sent to each element is at the specific, required values. For example, the corner number should be reduced and the distance between the feed lines should be more adequate for reduced coupling. To validate the authors design approach, a prototype of a 16-element aperture-coupled microstrip antenna was fabricated and tested (Fig. 3). The VSWR was simulated with commercial CAE software, and measured with the assistance of a model E8363B vector network analyzer (VNA) from Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com). The simulated and measured VSWR results are shown in Fig. 4. The design shows an impressive bandwidth of 74% from 1.13 to 2.48 GHz with measured VSWR of less than 2.0:1 across the bandwidth. The measured bandwidth shows a slight shift towards higher frequencies than the simulated performance, likely due to measurement errors and fabrication inconsistencies. Figure 5 shows simulated and measured gain versus frequency, with gain of more than 16.6 dBi over an 18.9% bandwidth from 1.92 to 2.32 GHz, and peak gain of 18.7 dBi at the center frequency. Figure 6 shows the simulated and measured axial ratio, indicating a 3-dB bandwidth of 57% from 1.5 to 2.7 GHz. In short, a wideband and high-gain, circularly polarized, aperture-coupled microstrip antenna array is presented

VSWR

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22 20

18 16 14 12 10

Simulated gain Measured gain

5. These plots show simulated and measured gain versus frequency for the wideband microstrip antenna.

GaindBi

1.9

2.0

2.1 FrequencyGHz

2.2

2.3

Propagation, Vol. 44, No. 8, August 1996, pp. 1196-1198. 3. T. Teshirogi, M. Tanaka, and W. Chujo, Wideband circularly polarized array antenna with sequential rotations and phase shifts of elements, in Proceeding International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation ISAP, Tokyo, Japan, August 1985, pp. 117-120. 4. J. Huang, A technique for an array to generate circular polarization using linearly polarized elements, IEEE Transaction on Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 34, No. 9, September 1986, pp. 1113-1124. 5. P.S. Hall, Application of sequential feeding to wide bandwidth circularly polarized microstrip patch arrays, IEE Proceedings on Microwave, Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 136, No. 5, October 1989, pp. 390-398. 6. Jeun-Wen Wu and Jui-Han Lu, 2 2 circularly polarized patch antenna arrays with broadband operation, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, Vol. 39, No. 5, December 2003, pp. 360-363. 7. Tiago Varum, Joo Matos, Pedro Pinho, et al., ACKNOWLEDGMENT Microstip antenna array for multiband dedicated short range communication systems, Microwave This work was supported by the Fundamental and Optical Technology Letters, Vol. 53, No. 12, Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. December 2011, pp. 2794-2796. K50511020018 and K5051202028). 8. Nasimuddin, Zhi Ning Chen, and K.P. Esselle, Wideband circular polarized microstrip antenna REFERENCES array using a new single feed network, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, Vol. 50, No. 7, 1. David M. Pozar, Microstrip antenna apertureJuly 2008, pp. 1784-1789. coupled to a microstrip line, Electronics Letters, 9. Y. Lu, D.G. Fang, and H. Wang, A Vol. 21, No. 2, January 1985, pp. 49-50. 2. V. Rathi, G. Kumar, and K.P. Ray, Improved wideband circular polarized 2 2 sequentially coupling for aperture coupled microstrip rotated patch antenna array, Microwave antennas, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and and Optical Technology Letters, Vol. 49, No. 6, June 2007, pp. 1405-1407. 10 10. H. Evans and A. Sambell, Wideband 2 2 sequentially 9 Simulated AR rotated patch antenna array 8 with a series feed, Microwave Measured AR and Optical Technology 7 Letters, Vol. 40, No. 4, February 2004, pp. 292-294. 6 11. Aixin Chen, Yanjun Zhang, Zhizhang Chen, et al., 5 Development of Ka -band 4 wideband circularly polarized 64-element microstrip antenna 3 array with double application of the sequential rotation feeding 2 technique, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 1 Vol. 10, 2011, pp. 1270-1273. 0 12. E.A. Soliman, S. Brebels, 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 E. Beyne, et al., SequentialFrequencyGHz rotation arrays of circularly polarized aperture antennas in the MCM-D technology, 6. These plots show simulated and measured axial ratio (AR) M i c r o w a v e a n d O p t i c a l Figure 6 Technology Letters, Vol. as functions of frequency from 1.5 to 2.7 GHz for the wide44, No. 6, March 2005, pp. 581-585. band microstrip antenna.
Axial ratiodB

Figure 5 here. A 16-element array was obtained by adopting a sequential rotation feeding technique to achieve a wider circular polarization bandwidth than normally possible, using the H-slot aperture-coupled microstrip antenna as an element in the array. The impedance bandwidth (for a VSWR of less than 2.0:1) and 3-dB axial-ratio bandwidth register 74% and 57%, respectively. The microstrip array achieves 18.7-dBi gain at the center of the band and represents a viable candidate for a number of wideband communications applications. MWRF

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