UWB( Ultra Wide Band Antenna) What is UWB antenna ??

In antenna terminology, an antenna with a bandwidth equal to 6:1 or more is defined as a UWB antenna while according to FCC; a UWB antenna should provide a gain and impedance bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz.

A Compact Microstrip Square-Ring Slot Antenna for UWB Applications

It benefits from a more compact size and lower level of x-polar compared to the wide slot antenna and at the same could provide good bandwidth. Recently, an "island like" space filling curves has been used for the development of broadband and circularly polarized square-ring slot antenna . Here, we propose an ultra wideband SRSA which is fed by a microstrip line with fork-like tuning stub while splitting the square slot ring inside of fork like feed. Furthermore with compression of square-ring slot, the antenna exhibits a relatively constant radiation pattern and gain over the band of UWB. Measured and simulated results of impedance bandwidth indicate the good agreement with each other. This structure creates more radiation pattern bandwidth than and more impedance bandwidth than . Antenna Structure The proposed antenna topology is a split square-ring slot in the ground plane of dielectric substrate. A SSRSA could be considered as a combination of a number of narrow slot radiators which are connected together, so it could provide a couple of resonances at different frequencies. The split in one arm actually increase the number of resonances by introducing new resonant lengths. This structure is fed by a single microstrip line with fork-like tuning stub. This feed mechanism also produces more resonant frequencies due to the fictitious short circuits which appear near the microstrip feed . In order to validate this concept, a SSRSA is designed, simulated, optimized and measured. Fig.1 shows the proposed antenna geometry. It is a 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 LgWg=120mm100mm and the length of split (S) is one of significant parameters to obtain the required impedance bandwidth.

Parametric Study The broad-band behavior of the antenna is followed by parametric study. Fig. 2 shows the effect of S changes on the return loss of antenna, which is evaluated by IE3D software. The required impedance bandwidth is observed in S equal to 0.8mm, it is obvious that the upper resonances are created by offcenter microstrip feed which has been expressed in [8]. Also Fig. 2 shows the effect of W changes on the return loss. It's observed that although the reduction of W makes compact the antenna structure, however the upper frequency resonances would be removed. Fig. 3 shows the simulated co- and cross polarized radiation pattern with W=11mm across the entire frequency band in H-plane (xz-plane) and E-plane (yzplane) respectively. The radiation pattern in E-plane is more consistent than in H-plane due to longitude of slot in y direction.

The UWB Antenna With S=0.8mm, a prototype antenna is fabricated, simulated by IE3D and HFSS software and measured which has been shown in Fig. 4. There is good agreement in resonant frequencies between the simulations and measurement results. The antenna has a VSWR of lower than 2.2 (S11<-8.5dB) from 3 to 11 GHz. The resonant frequencies are created in respect to resonant length of narrow slots which connected together and produced the SSRSA. This structure could also be designed more compact than . The other SSRSA dimensions are identified in table.1. These dimensions are obtained by performing an optimization for improving the impedance bandwidth by ADS software . Fig. 5 shows the relatively constant gain of optimized antenna over the band of frequency in H Plane (=90). However, the radiation patterns start to change in high frequencies and show higher directivities in other directions. It seems that the fork-like stub length is almost half wavelength in higher frequencies (i.e. from 7GHz) and starts to introduce spurious radiation. From simulation results the total gain is obtained about 4dBi2dBi across the frequency band.

Study of a Printed Circular Disc Monopole Antenna for UWB Systems Previous discoveries
Recently, several broadband monopole configurations, such as circular, square, elliptical, pentagonal and hexagonal, have been proposed for UWB applications . These broadband monopoles feature wide operating bandwidths, satisfactory radiation properties, simple structures and ease of fabrication. However, they are not planar structures because their ground planes are perpendicular to the radiators. As a result, they are not suitable for integration with a printed circuit board.

Uniqueness
Here a novel design of printed circular disc monopole fed by microstrip line is proposed and investigated

ANTENNA DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE

The proposed monopole antenna is illustrated in Fig. 1. A circular disc monopole with a radius of and a 50 ohm microstrip feed line are printed on the same side of the dielectric substrate (in this study, the FR4 substrate of thickness 1.5 mm and relative permittivity 4.7 was used). and denote the length and the width of the dielectric substrate, respectively. The width of the microstrip feed line is fixed at to

achieve 50 impedance. On the other side of the substrate, the conducting ground plane with a length of only covers the section of the microstrip feed line. is the height of the feed gap between the feed point and the ground plane. The simulations are performed using the CST Microwave Studio package which utilizes the finite integration technique for electromagnetic computation . A prototype of the proposed circular disc monopole antenna with optimal design, as shown in Fig. 1, Fig. 2 shows the simulated and the measured return loss curves. The measured 10 dB return loss bandwidth is from 2.78 to 9.78 GHz, while in simulation from 2.69 to 10.16 GHz. The measurement confirms the UWB characteristic of the proposed printed circular disc monopole, as predicted in the simulation.
A. Current Distributions

The simulated current distributions at different frequencies for the optimal design , and are presented in Fig. 3. Fig. 3(a) shows the current pattern near the first resonance at 3 GHz. The current pattern near the second resonance at 6.5 GHz is given in Fig. 3(b), indicating approximately a second order harmonic. Fig. 3(c) illustrates a more complicated current pattern at 9 GHz, corresponding to the third order harmonic.

B. The Effect of the Dimension of the Disc

Current distributions have indicated that the first resonant frequency is associated with the disc dimension. Actually, it is noticed in the simulations that the first resonance always occurs at around 3.5 GHz for different and different when equals to 10 mm [9]. Furthermore, the diameter of the disc (i.e., 20 mm) is very close to the quarter wavelength at the first resonant frequency which is around 21 mm.

C. Radiation Patterns and Gain The radiation patterns have been calculated and also measured inside an anechoic chamber. The measured and the simulated normalized radiation patterns at 3, 6.5, and 9 GHz are plotted in Figs. 57 respectively. The measured -plane patterns are very close to those obtained in the simulation. It is noticed that the plane pattern is omnidirectional at lower frequency (3 GHz) and is near omni-directional at higher frequencies (6 and 9 GHz), where the gain reduces 8 dB in the -direction at 9 GHz. In general, the shapes of the -plane patterns correspond well to the current patterns on the disc, as shown in Fig. 3 at different frequencies, respectively.

4.4.1 Circular Ring Monopole

It is seen in Figure 4.30 and Figure 4.41 that the current is mainly distributed along the edge of the disc for both CPW fed and microstrip line fed disc monopoles. This implies that the performance of the antenna is independent of the central part of the disc, and hence cutting this part to form a ring monopole can still achieve an ultra wide bandwidth. For microstrip line fed disc monopole given in Figure 4.37, we retain the optimal parameters, i.e. r=10mm, h=0.3mm, W=42mm and L=50mm, but cut a hole with radius of r1 in the disc center. Figure 4.43 illustrates the simulated return loss curves for different inner radii r1.

It is noticed in Figure 4.43 that when r1 is no more than 4mm, the return loss curve does not change much with the variation of r1. When r1 rises to 6mm, the return loss shifts up to higher than -10dB at around 5GHz. As a result, the -10dB bandwidth is narrowed remarkably. This indicates that a microstrip line fed circular ring monopole with inner radius r1 up to 4mm can provide similar operating bandwidth as its counterpart circular disc monopole (r1=0). In a similar way, it is found that for CPW fed case, a circular ring monopole with inner radius r1 up to 5mm can provide nearly identical return loss to that of the circular disc monopole with radius of 12.5mm. The measured results confirmed that circular ring monopole can exhibit nearly same characteristics as its disc counterpart if the inner radius is below a certain value, as predicted in the simulation.

Recent work in UWB antennas Advancements

A compact UWB printed antenna with both tunable and switchable band-notched behaviors has been realized by etching a resonant slot loaded with a varactor and a PIN diode. Over the UWB band, there are many narrow bands, such as WiMAX, WLAN, HYPERLAN/2, etc. To avoid interference between UWB system and narrow band systems, narrow-band interference mitigation must be considered in UWB system design. Realizing a band-notched behavior in antenna itself is a feasible method to decrease complexity of UWB system, compared to that with an extra filter. One of the usual strategies to provide this feature is to introduce a slot or strip in the antenna. The proposed antenna is illustrated in Figure 1. It is fabricated on a high-frequency substrate Ro4350B ("r = 3:48) with thickness of 0.762 mm, width of 30 mm, and length of 35 mm. A 50-- microstrip transmission line with width of 1.67 mm is adopted to feed the radiating patch. To achieve optimum impedance matching over UWB band, a staircase rectangular patch on the front side of the substrate and an open slot on the ground are adopted. A loop slot embedded on the patch is loaded with a pin diode and a varactor on the top and bottom side, respectively. The varactor used in this design is SMV1405- 079LF from Skyworks Solutions Inc., with tunable capacitance from 0.63 to 2.67 pF over a 0 to 30 V reverse bias voltage range. It gives a maximum forward current of 20 mA. The pin diode adopted is SMP1345-079LF also from Skyworks Solutions Inc., with capacitance of 0.18 pF under a 5 V reverse bias voltage. It gives a maximum reverse bias voltage of 50 V. The cathodes of the varactor and pin diode are connected to the copper inside the loop slot which is connected to the DC bias circuit on the backside through a via hole. Therefore, these two diodes are parallel connected in the same direction and can be controlled by a DC signal through the common bias networkProgress In Electromagnetics Research Letters, Vol. 30, 2012 23 conveniently, as shown in Figure 1. Under different reverse bias voltages, capacitance of the varactor changes, and a shift of resonant frequency of the slot is observed, while the pin diode is switched of with slight infuence on the resonant frequency characteristic due to its small capacitance. Under a slight forward bias voltage, the two diodes are partially turned on. In this case, the loop slot is split by these two diodes into two short slots of high resonant frequency beyond the UWB band that we concern about. Therefore, the notch band disappears.

MEASURE RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The return loss of the antenna has been measured using Agilent N5230A vector network analyzer. Figure 3(a) shows the measured return loss for different reverse bias voltages. By tuning reverse bias voltage from 0 to 30 V, the capacitance of the varactor changes from 2.67 to 0.63 pF, a drift of the notch band edge from 4.7 to 6.8 GHz is observed. The measured return loss of the antenna under various forward bias voltages is shown in Figure 3(b). By increasing the forward bias voltage from 0.2 to 2 V, the two diodes are turned on gradually. It is observed that notch band exists until the forward bias voltage rises to 0.6 V. If the forward bias voltage continues to increase to 2 V, the two diodes are completely switched on, but the return loss of the antenna is almost unchanged compared to that under 0.6V bias voltage. The currents of whole bias network for corresponding bias voltages are also shown in Figure 3(b). By operating the two diodes with 4.00 A bias current which corresponds to 0.6V bias voltage, the power consumption can be reduced to only 2.4 Wwhich is much lower than 1.1mW mentioned .

Conclusion

UWB antenna poses its own difficulties , as many parameters keep changing with slight modifications of the physical parameters. Different types of antennas are discussed and their design procedure is also described briefly.