Int. J. Electron. Commun.

(AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Electronics and

Communications (AEÜ)
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aeue

Regular paper

A customized reduced size Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna used in Wireless

Baseband Transmission for short-range communication
Furat Abayaje, Pascal Febvre ⇑
IMEP-LAHC CNRS UMR 5130, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, Le Bourget du Lac, France

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: An Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA) with a reduced size of 37 mm
21 mm has been designed, simu-
Received 18 September 2016 lated and fabricated on 1.6 mm-thick FR4 substrate for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications. It is cus-
Accepted 8 October 2016 tomized with a slot resonator located on the ground plane only and with a shift of the ground plane
input. AVA simulations and measurements are presented and are in good agreement. The antenna exhi-
bits a voltage standing wave ratio of less than 2, and a peak gain in the 0.5 to 4.5 dB range through the
Keywords: 3.6–12 GHz frequency range. The antennas were arranged in an emitter-receiver aligned configuration
UWB antenna
with a distance R = 1 cm, in order to send and receive digital data directly at 1 Gbps with 20-bits input
Wireless communication
Digital communication
data, based on the Wireless Baseband Transmission (WBT) scheme with Manchester and Polar RZ encod-
Superconducting electronics ings. Measurements show the recovery of the input digital signals after processing of transmitted output
Baseband transmission signal and are encouraging to use broadband AVA with a linear phase characteristic as a possible candi-
date for use in short range communication in cryogenic environment.
Ó 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction sion, in line with the choice of developing all-digital software-

The increasing demand of data transmission rates, in particular
for processing signals on microwave carriers, for instance for satel-
lite telecommunications, requires the development of specific cir-
cuits and antennas. In particular, some systems that require fast
processing at clock rates above 20 GHz rely on superconducting
Rapid Single-Flux Quantum (RSFQ) digital circuits to process the
signals [1,2]. For such circuits, which are cooled at the temperature
of liquid helium, the processed data need to be transferred at
room-temperature for further processing. To do so, since the num-
ber of wires needs to be limited to reduce the thermal load on the
cryogenic system, a wireless link is an attractive solution. The fea-
sibility has already been shown in the 8–12 GHz band [3] for the
transmission of microwave analogue signals, like for instance sig-
nals at the intermediate frequency of radiofrequency mixers. On
the other hand, superconducting digital circuits, for example
analogue-to-digital converters that process an instantaneous
bandwidth of a few hundreds of MHz, can produce digital data at
rates in the range of 40 to more than 100 Gbps per channel. An
example of such signals is given in Fig. 1a. In this case the challenge
is to transmit digital data without further need of down conver-
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: pascal.febvre@univ-smb.fr (P. Febvre).
defined radio systems. Consequently, after a proper on-chip de-
multiplexing of digital data to lower the rates in the 1–10 Gbps
range, it is preferable to transmit data directly in the base band
with small size antennas placed in short distance configuration.
The short distance is fixed by the distance between the cryogenic
stage at the temperature of liquid helium and the outer part of
the cryogenic system at room temperature (see Fig. 1b). We should
point out that the broad bandwidth associated to such digital sig-
nals does not allow to simply consider that the antennas radiate in
far- or near-field, since this feature depends on the frequency. We
use the terminology of short distance configuration to discuss the
respective positions of the transmitting and receiving antennas.
Since the instantaneous bandwidth to transmit is broad in our
case, we investigated the ultra-wideband technology to solve our
issue. Indeed, it is a common approach in wireless communication
systems to transmit and receive pulses in the time domain, rather
than sinusoidal waves processed in the frequency domain [4]. The
design is based on Vivaldi antennas, that are popular UWB anten-
nas investigated since 1979 [4–8], and on the Wireless Baseband
Transmission (WBT) communication technology. The objective is
to transmit the digital data streams from superconducting circuits,
after Manchester or polar RZ encodings, directly from an antenna
and without any modulation technique [5].

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aeue.2016.10.007
1434-8411/Ó 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691 1685

Fig. 1. (a) Typical output digital signal of a RSFQ superconducting electronics circuit. In black the original signal. In blue the intrinsically filtered signal of interest. (b) Block
diagram of short distance configuration setup for wireless transmission of digital data from a cryogenic environment. D is the typical diameter of the cryogenic windows, of
about 20 mm. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Table 1 2. Antenna geometry and design

Comparison of our customized AVA with some other AVA from the literature.

AVA Ref. Dimension L ⁄ W Operating frequency Gain (dB) Recently, various antennas have been developed for UWB com-
(mm2) (GHz) munications [5–11]. In our case, small antipodal Vivaldi antennas
[6] 60 ⁄ 48 2.4 to >14 measured 3.7–10 based on elliptical curves have been designed to transmit and
[7] 40.16 ⁄ 42.56 3.1–10.6 measured 1 to 3.8 receive digital data streams with Manchester or Polar RZ encodings
[8] 42 ⁄ 36 3.7 to >18 measured 1.8 to 6.9
at a data rate above 1 Gbps. Table 1 summarizes the comparison
[9] 66.4 ⁄ 50 4 to >30 simulated 5–7
This work 37 ⁄ 21 3.6 to >12 measured 0.5 to 4.5
between the proposed antenna and antennas from literature. To
fit our needs with the limited space inside the cryogenic system
the proposed AVA is smaller in dimensions than the ones with
antipodal configuration reported in [6–9]. Besides we optimized
it to obtain similar or better performance.
This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the AVA antenna The description of the design of the Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna
design is explained. The main properties derived from our needs under concern is given in [12–13]. Two AVAs fed by a 50X micro-
are described from an analytical approach and compared with strip transmission line have been designed to be fabricated on a
some previous work that served as a starting point. Detailed fea- FR4 substrate of thickness h = 1.6 mm with er ¼ 4:4 dielectric con-
tures have been adjusted by simulations. The antenna has been stant, and a dielectric loss tangent d ¼ 0:02 (see Fig. 2). In a second
fabricated in a second step, its performance is discussed in section step the UWB range has been improved by adding a slot (Fig. 3).
3. In a further step two AVA were aligned at a short distance from The total size L
W of the antenna composed of a feed line and
each other to reproduce the final expected configuration. We ver- radiation flares is 37
21 mm2. The shape of the flares is designed
ified experimentally the proper transmission of digital data in the form of elliptical curves. The elliptical configuration presents
streams and present the measurements in Section 4. Finally, we good broadband characteristics due to the smooth transition
conclude in section 5. between the radiation flares and the feeding line. It is one of the

Fig. 2. (a) Simulated return loss and (b) layout of the AVA. Total size (L ⁄ W) is 37 ⁄ 21 mm2 on FR4 substrate thickness with h = 1.6 mm, Wf = 3 mm, and Wp = 20 mm.
1686 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691

Fig. 3. (a) Simulated return loss and (b) layout of AVA. Total size (L ⁄ W) is 37 ⁄ 21 mm2 with FR4 substrate thickness h = 1.6 mm, Wf = 2 mm, and Wp = 20 mm. The ground
plane is shifted by 1 mm.


optimum curvatures [9]. The width of the feeding line to obtain a Wf 120p
for P1: Z 0 ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi W ð2Þ
characteristic impedance Z0 ¼ 50X equal to that of the feeding h eeff ½ hf þ 1:393 þ 23 lnðWhf þ 1:444Þ
coaxial cable has been calculated to be Wf =3 mm using the follow-
ing equations [14]:
1=2


 er þ 1 er  1 12h
Wf 60 8h W f eeff ¼ þ 1þ ð3Þ
for <1: Z 0 ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ln þ ð1Þ 2 2 Wf
h eeff W f 4h
eeff ¼ 3:32 in our case for Wf = 3 mm. Theoretically, the upper fre-
quency limit of a Vivaldi antenna is infinite, while the lower fre-
quency limit depends mainly on the width of antenna and on the
dielectric constant (er Þ. The lower cutoff frequency can be calcu-
lated from [4], [15]:
c
f min ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð4Þ
W p  1:5  er þ 1

where Wp is the total width of two antenna arms of 20 mm, and c is

the velocity of light in free space. The lower frequency is found to be
4.3 GHz.

3. Results and analysis

Fig. 2 shows the layout of the initial AVA design, along with the
simulated return loss, revealing the UWB performance on a band-
width ranging from 4.3 to more than 12 GHz. The width (W) of
AVA is 21 mm corresponding to the lowest frequency of operation
(fmin = 4.3 GHz) while the length (L) of the AVA of 37 mm corre-
Fig. 4. Return loss performance of the proposed antenna with and without the slot.
sponds to L = 0.53⁄k, where k is the wavelength at 4.3 GHz. The
antenna is fed by a 3 mm-wide microstrip line. The optimal dimen-
sions have been adjusted with the aid of the HFSS simulation
software.
In a second step, the antenna has been modified by etching a
slot resonator on the ground plane only and by shifting the ground
plane input port by 1 mm as shown in Fig. 3. As a result, the low-
end cutoff frequency of the antenna has been significantly reduced
by 20% from 4.3–3.6 GHz. The width of the feed line has also been
reduced to Wf = 2 mm to keep a good match with the same antenna
size. The modification of the ground plane line and the addition of
a slot to the antenna are the main significant differences compared
to other Vivaldi antennas. The slot technique has been used for
lengthening the excited surface current on the radiation elements
and for improving the antenna bandwidth [16–18]. Adjusting the
(a) (b)
length of the slot allows to control the resonance frequency. The
Fig. 5. Surface current distribution of the proposed antenna at 7 GHz. (a) without influence of the presence of the slot and of the shift of the ground
slot (b) with slot. plane are described one after the other, below.
 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691 1687

Fig. 6. Return loss performance of the proposed antenna for different widths, lengths, and positions of the slots etched on both sides of the antenna. Position of slot: (a) g = 9.5
(b) g = 8.5.

Fig. 7. Return loss simulations of the proposed antenna for different widths, lengths, and positions of the slot etched on the ground plane only. (a) slot length = 6 mm, position
of slot g = 9.5 mm, slot widths: 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2 mm (b) slot width = 0.5 mm, position of slot g = 9.5 mm, slot lengths : 3, 5, 6 and 7 mm (c) slot length = 6 mm, slot
width = 0.5 mm, positions of slot : 7.5, 8.5, 9.5 and 11.5 mm.

3.1. Effect of the ground plane slot equation, where eeff ¼ 3:22 obtained from equation (3) for
Wf = 2 mm:
The length of the slot has been designed for a center frequency
k0 c
of 7 GHz for our application. The corresponding guided wavelength kg ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ; k0 ¼ ð5Þ
eeff f
kg in presence of the substrate is calculated from the following
1688 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691

Fig. 8. Return loss with a ground plane shift of S = 0, 1, 2, 3 mm. (a) layout of the shifted ground plane (S) with an extended input microstrip line. (b) S11 with ground plane
slot. (c) S11 without ground plane slot.

Fig. 9. Simulation VSWR and peak gain versus frequency for the AVA with a slot
resonator and a ground plane shifted by 1 mm.

The length of the slot has been taken equal to a quarter of the
guided wavelength kg ¼ 23:9 mm. A slot of 0.5 mm width and
6 mm lengthð0:25kg Þ was etched on the ground plane at a suitable
position. As a result the S11 return loss behavior is considerably
more efficient. The comparison of return losses between the two
antipodal Vivaldi antennas, with and without the slot, is presented
in Fig. 4. S11 is lower than 10 dB from 3.6 to more than 12 GHz in
presence of the slot. In order to understand the behavior of the slot
on the ground plane, especially for frequencies between 5.5 GHz to
9.5 GHz where a resonance seems to appear, maps of the current
distribution over the antennas with and without the slot on the Fig. 10. Measurements of the AVA radiation patterns.
 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691
Fig. 11. Simulation of surface current distribution of the AVA. (a) 3.5 GHz. (b) 7 GHz. (c) 9 GHz. (d) 11 GHz.
Fig. 12. Photograph of the fabricated AVA.
1689
ground plane have been simulated at 7 GHz and are given in Fig. 5.
As the figure reveals, the surface current of antenna without slot in
region A is very small at 7 GHz. It is demonstrated that most of the
input energy is reflected and cannot be radiated. Thus, the return
loss of antenna without slot shown in Fig. 4 is high from 5.5 GHz
to 9.5 GHz. On the other hand, by etching the slot, significant cur-
rent is observed about the edge of the slot in region B (see Fig. 5).
This indicates that the effective length of the current path on the
antenna is lengthened by the modification. The insertion of the slot
in the ground plane causes an increase of the bandwidth with a
good impedance match in the 5.84–9.38 GHz frequency range, as
shown in Fig. 4.
Figs. 6 and 7 show the simulated return losses for four various
cases for different lengths, widths and positions of the slot, etched
either only on the ground plane or on both metallic layers.
When the slot is etched on both sides of the antenna as shown
in Fig. 6, the lower resonant mode at about 3.8 GHz is not modified
while the good impedance match found in Fig. 4 with only one slot
1690 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691
Fig. 13. Comparison of simulated and measured S11.
in the 5.84–9.38 GHz bandwidth is not as good with two slots on
each side. Nevertheless there is an impedance match improve-
ment, but for a different length of slot (7 mm instead of 6 mm)
likely due to a different lengthening of the current path, and not
as good as in Fig. 4, even if other parameters, like the position of
the slots, are varied.
Tx data
Rx data
Fig. 14. Measured transmission of two line codes with two AVA placed in aligned configuration at R = 1 cm.(a) setup of two AVA (b) input data of Polar RZ and Manchester at
side transmitter (AWG) (c) output waveform of Polar RZ and Manchester at side receiver (DSO) (d) detection results with a computer program.
Fig. 7(a) shows the variations of the S11 return loss for different
widths of slot from 0.5 mm to 2 mm for a fixed length of slot of
6 mm. One sees that the impedance match is not highly sensitive
to the S11 parameter while a stronger dependence is observed
when varying the length of the slot from 3 mm to 7 mm for a fixed
width of slot as shown in Fig. 7(b). The effect of the position of the
slot for fixed slot length and width is shown in Fig. 7(c) and needs
to be taken into account during the design phase.
3.2. Effect of the shift of the ground plane position
The layout of the ground plane shifted farther from the connec-
tor point is shown in Fig. 8(a). This modification, combined with
the presence of the ground plane slot, leads to a remarkable effi-
ciency in the low frequency part of the spectrum, without affecting
the original antenna length. The simulated return loss performance
for a shift S = 0, 1, 2, 3 mm is shown in Fig. 8(b,c), respectively for
an antenna with and without ground plane slot. The low-end oper-
ating frequency decreases from 4.28 GHz to 3.52 GHz, on the con-
dition that S11 is lower than 10 dB. The AVA structure with
S = 1 mm and a ground plane slot is the best combination to minia-
turize the electrical size of the antenna.
3.3. VSWR and antenna gain
The VSWR provides an estimate of an antenna’s match with its
environment. It is required that it stays below 2 across the entire
UWB spectrum, from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz to insure proper match. Sim-
ulation results presented in Fig. 9 clearly show that the VSWR is
less than 1.7 over the frequency range from 3.6 GHz to more than
10110010110001011001
10110010110001011001
 F. Abayaje, P. Febvre / Int. J. Electron. Commun. (AEÜ) 70 (2016) 1684–1691
12 GHz for this antenna. Fig. 9 also shows the simulated peak gain
of the proposed antenna versus frequency. As can be seen, the peak
gain varies from 0.5 dB to 4.5 dB over the frequency range of
operation, which is satisfactory for our application.
3.4. Radiation patterns and current distribution
The measured radiation patterns of the proposed antenna in the
two principal X-Z and Y-Z planes are presented in Fig. 10 at the res-
onant frequencies of 3.5, 7, 9 and 11 GHz. It can be seen that the
gain in X-Z and Y-Z planes exhibits nearly omnidirectional patterns
at phi = 0 and bidirectional patterns at phi = 90°.
The simulated surface current the distributions of the proposed
antenna carried out by HFSS at the same frequencies are given in
Fig. 11. For the first resonant frequency of 3.5 GHz the surface cur-
rent is mainly concentrated on the microstrip feed line while res-
onant frequencies at 7, 9 and 11 GHz are concentrated at the
microstrip line feed and radiation side.
The photograph of the fabricated antenna is shown in Fig. 12
while the measured and simulated S11 of the proposed antenna
are shown in Fig. 13. Measurements were carried out with a
37369A Anritsu Vector Network Analyzer. It can be observed that
both simulated and measured S11 are lower than 10 dB from
3.6 to more than 12 GHz. The comparison of simulated results with
measurements shows a slight shift in frequency observed for the
low resonant frequency (3.6 GHz for the simulation vs. 3.68 GHz
for the measurements, corresponding to a shift of 2.2%). The differ-
ence is mainly caused by slight size shifts during fabrication and
numerical errors. Also the connection between the printed circuit
board and the SMA connector is not ideal.
4. Wireless baseband transmission in a short-distance
configuration
Two identical antennas were placed in a short distance config-
uration to transmit and receive directly digital Polar RZ and
Manchester encoded signals, without any modulation technique.
The distance between the closest edges of each AVA was R = 1 cm
as shown in Fig. 14(a).
An Arbitrary Wave Generator (AWG) is used as a transmitter
and a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) is used as a receiver. A
20-bit code pattern signal [10110010110001011001], chosen to
be compatible with the memory depth of the DSO, was prepared
using a computer and supplied to the AWG, which sent it at 1Gbps
to the transmitting antenna. The Manchester and the Polar RZ
encodings were used. The signals received by the second antenna
were captured with the DSO and processed with a computer pro-
gram to assess the performance of the transmission. The calcula-
tion of the Bit Error Rate (BER) was based on the number of
sampled points (N) (Fig. 14(c)) that describe each bit of the digital
input signal. For each encoding, Polar RZ and Manchester, the mea-
h i
sured analogue values of all sampled points in the 0  T2b time
interval, corresponding to the first half region ½0  N=2 of the (N)
points, are averaged. Then, depending whether the average value
is positive or negative, it is transformed in a digital ‘‘1” or a digital
‘‘1”, corresponding to the expected value in this time interval for
the symbol of the bit. Also, the average of the second half of the
h i
(N) sampled points (½N=2  NÞ corresponding to the T2b  T b time
interval) is automatically set to zero. From this processing, the
value of the bit in the corresponding encoding is recovered and
indicated in Fig. 14(d). At last, a comparison is done between
recovered and input bits to calculate the BER. It is shown in the
table of Fig. 14. For the pattern presented in Fig. 14, there is a per-
fect recovery of the input digital signal.
1691
5. Conclusion
A small antipodal Vivaldi antenna designed on FR4 substrate
using a slot resonator has been designed, fabricated and measured.
With a simple design, the proposed antenna structure operates in a
broad band from 3.6 GHz to more than 12 GHz. It exhibits a voltage
standing wave lower than 2.0, and a peak gain of 0.5 to 4.5 dB in
the frequency range. By comparison with other antipodal Vivaldi
antennas satisfying UWB requirements, our design has a smaller
size so that the proposed antenna can be easily integrated in a pla-
nar circuit. The transmission of digital data at 1 Gbps with Manch-
ester and Polar RZ encodings has been performed and measured.
The results show that the AVA is suitable for a WBT scheme when
using broadband antennas with a linear phase characteristic.
Future work will imply the verification with different distances
between antennas and the verification with more digital patterns
and with longer words, before implementing the system in a cryo-
genic environment.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Mr. Antoine Gachon and Mr.
Nicolas Corrao for their technical assistance. F. A. has been finan-
cially supported by Campus France.
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