936 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO.
5, MAY 2019
Broadband SIW Cavity-Backed Modified
Dumbbell-Shaped Slot Antenna
Tong Cheng , Wen Jiang , Member, IEEE, Shuxi Gong, Member, IEEE, and Yaqing Yu
Abstract—A cavity-backed modified dumbbell-shaped slot an-
tenna based on a substrate integrated waveguide technology is
proposed in this letter. Compared with the traditional dumbbell-
shaped slot, the modified dumbbell-shaped slot not only introduces
several new resonant points, but also makes the antenna obtain
a higher gain. In addition, the high-order resonant modes (TE102 ,
TE301 , TE302 ) inside the subcavity are excited by the ground copla-
nar waveguide feeding structure, and the broadband impedance
bandwidth can be achieved by making the high-order modes close
to each other. The measured results show that the proposed antenna
achieves an impedance bandwidth of 26.7% from 18.2 to 23.8 GHz
and a peak gain of 9.5 dBi at 20.4 GHz. The cross-polarization levels
of the antenna are around –40 dB at three measured frequencies.
Index Terms—Broadband antenna, cavity-backed slot antenna,
high gain, high-order mode, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW).
I. INTRODUCTION
VER the past years, the cavity-backed antennas [1]–
O [14], especially cavity-backed slot antennas [3]–[14],
have been widely used among the wireless communication sys-
tems due to their attractive advantages. However, the traditional
cavity-backed slot antennas have high profiles, so it is difficult
to integrate with other planar circuits. Recently, the above prob-
lem can be solved by introducing the substrate integrated wave-
guide (SIW) structure to the planer cavity-backed slot antenna.
However, due to the high-Q characteristic of the SIW cavity,
the impedance bandwidth (BW) of the SIW cavity-backed slot
antenna is narrow.
To expand the impedance bandwidth of the SIW cavity-
backed slot antenna, several techniques have been proposed.
Yun et al. broaden the bandwidth by removing the substrate un-
der or next to the slot, but the bandwidth did not exceed 5%
[3], [4]. In [5], [6], the coupling between the slots with different
lengths enables the antenna to achieve an impedance bandwidth
of 8.5%. Luo et al. [7] and Mukherjee et al. [8] proposed the use
of the hybrid modes to widen the broadband. In [7], a rectangular
Manuscript received November 12, 2018; revised January 8, 2019 and March
4, 2019; accepted March 12, 2019. Date of publication March 27, 2019; date of
current version May 3, 2019. This work was supported in part by the National
Basic Research Program of China-973 program under Grant 2015CB857100; in
part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61401327
and Grant 61471278; and in part by the National Key R&D Program of China
under Grant 2017YFF0205200. (Corresponding author: Wen Jiang.)
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Antennas and
Microwave Technology, the Collaborative Innovation Center of Informa-
tion Sensing and Understanding, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
(e-mail:,chengtong26@163.com; jw13@vip.qq.com; shxgong@xidian.edu.cn;
yuyaqing27@163.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2019.2906119
1536-1225 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
slot is used to generate a hybrid mode, which helps the antenna
realize an operational bandwidth of 6.3%. Compared with the
rectangular slot, the improved bow-tie slot antenna obtains a
wider impedance bandwidth of 9.4% [8]. A dual resonant slot-
patch antenna achieves an impedance bandwidth of 17.32% with
the help of the perturbative TM11 mode [9]. In [10], impedance
bandwidths of 15.2% and 17.5% are realized by coupling the
lower modes with higher modes. In [11], a broadband dual-mode
(TE102 and TE201 modes) triangular-complimentary-split-ring-
slot (TCSRS) antenna achieves an impedance bandwidth of
16.7% at 28 GHz; however, the antenna has a high cross-
polarization level and a low gain at lower frequencies. The mul-
tilayer structure with the coupled feeding element introduced in
[12]–[14] is also conducive to widen the impedance bandwidth.
In [12], the meta-mushroom structure and the coupled feeding
structure help the bow-tie slot antenna achieve an impedance
bandwidth of 21.8%. In [14], four gradually widened SIW cav-
ities are excited by the slot-coupled feeding structure, which
helps the antenna achieve an impedance bandwidth of more than
30%. However, the multilayer structures and high profiles limit
their application.
In this letter, a broadband cavity-backed slot antenna with
high gain characteristic is presented by combining the modi-
fied dumbbell-shaped slot and the high-order modes in the SIW
cavity. The measured results indicate that the proposed antenna
achieves an impedance bandwidth of 26.7% and a maximum
gain of 9.5 dBi. This letter is organized as follows: Section II
describes the configuration and field distribution of the antenna.
The measured and simulated results are presented in Section III.
Finally, Section IV concludes the letter.
II. CONFIGURATION AND DESIGN ANALYSIS
The proposed antenna is completely built on a single-layer
substrate (Rogers-Duroid 5880) with a thickness of 0.787 mm,
and its geometry is shown in Fig. 1. The square SIW cavity is
formed by four rows of metallic vias together with two metal-
lic plates on the top and bottom of the substrate. The diameter
(D) and spacing (S) of the vias can be optimized to maintain
the conditions D/S ≥ 0.5 and D/λ0 ≤ 0.1 (λ0 is the free-space
wavelength) to ensure minimum leakage of energy [15].
The modified dumbbell-shaped slot is etched on the top metal-
lic plate and placed at a distance of “Ds” from the short end of
the cavity. To generate high-order modes in the cavity and in-
tegrate with planar circuits easily, a 50 Ω grounded coplanar
waveguide (GCPW) with additional tilted slots is used as the
CHENG et al.: BROADBAND SIW CAVITY-BACKED MODIFIED DUMBBELL-SHAPED SLOT ANTENNA
Fig. 1. Geometry of the proposed design. (W = 20, L = 25, Hsub = 0.787,
W50 = 2.4, D = 0.65, S = 1.3, Li = 7, Wi = 0.5, Li1 = 8, Wi1 = 0.7,
L1 = 3.19, W1 = 2, L2 = 0.75, L3 = 1, W2 = 3, W3 = 6, L4 = 1, W4 = 0.5,
W5 = 2.35, Ds = 7.1, Dl = 1.75, L = 25, Ws = 20, W = 18.2, unit: mm).
Fig. 2. Evolution of the modified dumbbell-shaped slot. (a) Ant. 1. (b) Ant. 2.
(c) Ant. 3. (d) Ant. 4.
feeding element. Simultaneously, the tilted slots divide the SIW
cavity into two subcavities, which creates the necessary changes
in the field distribution. In addition, a 50 Ω microstrip feeding
line is connected with the GCPW for measurement convenience.
For the SIW cavity-backed slot antenna, the impedance band-
width is jointly determined by the shape of the slot and the modes
in the cavity. Therefore, the slot and the modes are analyzed, re-
spectively, for a better understanding of the broadband operating
principle of the proposed antenna.
A. Modified Dumbbell-Shaped Slot
The idea of using the modified dumbbell-shaped slot comes
from the evolution process in which the radiation slot is changed
from a dumbbell-shaped slot to a bow-tie-shaped slot for the
broadband impedance bandwidth. The design process of the
modified dumbbell-shaped slot is shown in Fig. 2. Ant. 1 only
contains a dumbbell-shaped slot (slot #1); Ant. 2 includes a
dumbbell-shaped slot and a longitudinal slot (slot #2); Ant. 3
937
Fig. 3. Simulated |S11 | of Ants. 1–4.
has a dumbbell-shaped slot, a longitudinal slot, and a transverse
slot (slot #3); and Ant. 4 is formed by introducing a pair of
longitudinal slots (slot #4) in Ant. 3.
To obtain the maximum perturbation of the field, in the initial
design, the distance (Pslot ) from the end of the cavity to the
slot is λg,T E30 /4 (where λg,T E30 is the waveguide wavelength
of the TE30 mode, which is equal to 18.9 mm). The transverse
length (Lslot ) of slot #1 is 2∗Weff /3 (where Weff is the equivalent
width of the subcavity, which is equal to 18 mm), and the
longitudinal length (Wslot ) is λg,T E30 /8. These parameters are
optimized to achieve the maximum impedance bandwidth, and
the final geometry and dimensions of the proposed antenna are
shown in Fig. 1.
The simulated |S11 | of Ants. 1–4 is shown in Fig. 3. It can be
found that Ant. 1 only has two distinct resonant frequencies. The
introduction of slot #2 can improve the impedance bandwidth
by generating a new resonant frequency. As shown in Ant. 3,
slot #3 is added to the upper edge of slot #1, which results in
new discontinuities and the bandwidth at higher frequencies is
expanded. In Ant. 4, slot #4 helps to eliminate the notched
band within the operating bandwidth by stimulating the dramatic
changes in the first and the second resonant frequencies. In short,
the modified dumbbell-shaped slot helps the SIW cavity-backed
slot antenna obtain a broadband bandwidth performance.
By constantly introducing the transverse and longitudinal
slots to the dumbbell-shaped slot antenna, several close resonant
frequencies are generated to broaden the bandwidth. Moreover,
the transverse slot still occupies the dominant position of the
modified dumbbell-shaped slot, which lays the foundation for
the low cross-polarization performance. As can be seen from the
above analyses, the fifth resonant frequency is only determined
by slot #3, and slot #4 has an obvious impact on the lower fre-
quencies of the proposed antenna. Furthermore, no matter how
the radiation slot changes, there is almost no change at the fourth
resonant point, which, to a certain extent, indicates that the fourth
resonant point is mainly produced by the tilted slots of the feed-
ing structure. All the above deductions will be verified in Section
II-B with the specific parametric analysis.
B. Parametric Study
To verify the effect of the slot on the impedance bandwidth of
the proposed antenna, several specific parameters will be studied
in this section.
938 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 5, MAY 2019

Fig. 5. E-field vector distributions of the subcavity (a) at 18.4 GHz (even
TE301 mode) (b) at 19.4 GHz (odd TE301 mode).

Fig. 6. E-field vector distribution of the cavity at 21.9 GHz.

Fig. 4. Simulated |S11 | according to the variation of (a) Li1 , (b) W3 , and
(c) D1 .

Fig. 4(a) shows the simulated |S11 | according to the variation

of Li1 , and it is obtained that the fourth resonant frequency shifts
to the lower frequency as Li1 increases. In addition, the change of
Li1 has a certain influence on the first resonant frequency, which
is mainly attributed to the change of the feeding structure that
causes poor match at lower frequencies. Finally, Li1 = 8 mm is
chosen to obtain the maximum bandwidth.
The influence of W3 on the simulated |S11 | is shown in
Fig. 4(b). By increasing the value of W3 , the fifth resonant fre-
quency gradually shifts toward the higher frequency, which can
expand the bandwidth. However, when W3 is equal to 7 mm, the
requirement for |S11 | ≤ –10 dB is not satisfied around 19 GHz.
Therefore, to expand the impedance bandwidth as wide as pos-
sible, W3 has been set at 6 mm.
Fig. 4(c) delineates the simulated |S11 | with different D1 . It can
be seen that there is almost no drift of other resonant frequencies Fig. 7. Electric field distributions at different frequencies. (a) 21 GHz.
except for the second one, which helps to eliminate the notched (b) 23.1 GHz. (c) Hybrid mode at 21 GHz. (d) Hybrid mode at 23.1 GHz.
band of Ant. 3. In addition, when D1 = 3.5 mm, the antenna has
the best performance.
Fig. 7 shows the electric field magnitude distributions at the
third and fifth resonant frequencies. It can be seen that the elec-
C. Analysis of SIW Modes tric field distributions are not the standard mode. As shown in
In this section, the modes of the five resonant frequencies Fig. 7(a), the electric field is mainly concentrated in the middle
(18.4, 19.4, 21, 21.9, and 23.1 GHz) will be briefly analyzed. of the modified dumbbell-shaped slot and the both sides of the
Fig. 5 shows the simulated electric field vector distributions upper half of the subcavity. This is because the TE301 and TE102
in subcavity at the first and second resonant frequencies. The modes are excited simultaneously in the subcavity. The super-
modes at 18.4 and 19.4 GHz are even TE301 mode and odd position of the two modes leads to the emergence of the hybrid
TE301 mode because their electric field vector distributions are mode, which can be seen in Fig. 7(c), where the symbols “+” and
even and odd symmetric with respect to the slot, respectively. “–” represent the upward direction and the vertical downward
Fig. 6 shows the electric field vector distribution at the fourth direction of the electric field vertical, respectively. Another high-
resonant frequency, and it can be clearly observed that the ra- order hybrid mode is excited at 23.1 GHz, as shown in Fig. 7(b),
diation is mainly generated by the tilted slots of the feeding and the dominant electric field distribution exists on both sides
structure. of the slot and the subcavity. Fig. 7(d) reveals the operational
CHENG et al.: BROADBAND SIW CAVITY-BACKED MODIFIED DUMBBELL-SHAPED SLOT ANTENNA 939

Fig. 8. Measured and simulated |S11 | of the proposed antenna.

principle of the hybrid mode (superposition of TE302 and TE102

mode), which is consistent with the field distribution shown in
Fig. 7(b).

III. MEASURED RESULT AND DISCUSSION

To demonstrate the simulated performance of the proposed
antenna, a prototype is fabricated. A photograph of the sample
is included in Fig. 8.
The comparison between measured and simulated |S11 | is
shown in Fig. 8, which displays an excellent agreement with
each other. The measured and simulated impedance bandwidths
are 26.7% (18.2–23.8 GHz) and 25.8% (18.2–23.6 GHz), respec-
tively. The slight variation might be attributed to some errors that
are not carefully weighed in the simulation, such as fabrication
tolerance, the presence of solder.
The measured and simulated radiation patterns are shown in
Fig. 9. The measured radiation patterns are compared with the
Fig. 9. Measured and simulated radiation patterns. (a) 19 GHz in E-plane.
simulated ones in E- and H-plane at three different frequencies. (b) 19 GHz in H-plane. (c) 21 GHz in E-plane. (d) 21 GHz in H-plane.
It can be seen that the measured and simulated copolarized ra- (e) 23 GHz in E-plane. (f) 23 GHz in H-plane.
diation patterns are similar to each other in two orthogonal cut
planes at the three measured frequencies. The measured cross-
polarized results and the corresponding simulated ones are quite
different, which is mainly due to the low cross-polarization level
and large noise interference. In addition, it should be noted that
the tilted slots of the GCPW feed structure participate in the
radiation at higher frequencies, and with the increase of the fre-
quency, the electrical length between the two radiators changes,
which results in the deviation of the maximum radiation direc-
tion.
The measured and simulated gains are shown in Fig. 10. The
measured gain is slightly less than the simulated gain, which
could be attributed to the additional loss introduced by the coax-
ial connector. Moreover, the measured result shows that the an- Fig. 10. Measured and simulated gains of the proposed antenna.
tenna possesses a 1 dB gain bandwidth of 9.6% from 19.8 to 21.8
GHz with a peak gain of 9.5 dBi at 20.4 GHz, and the 3 dB gain
the broadband impedance bandwidth can be obtained by making
bandwidth even reaches as much as 22.2% from 18.4 to 23 GHz,
the high-order modes close to each other. In addition, the mod-
which is much wider than the previously reported ones.
ified slot and high-order modes improve the gain of antenna.
Moreover, for the modified dumbbell-shaped slot, the domi-
IV. CONCLUSION nant position of the transverse slot determines the low cross-
A broadband SIW cavity-backed modified dumbbell-shaped polarization level of antenna. The mentioned merits make the
slot antenna is proposed in this letter. The interaction of the slot proposed antenna more suitable for many broadband, high-gain,
and the feeding structure helps to excite high-order modes, and and low cross-polarized applications.
940 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 5, MAY 2019
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