International Conference on Computational Systems in Engineering and Technology, March 7 & 8 2014, Chennai

Design and Development of Antipodal Linearly

Tapered Slot Antenna Using Substrate Integrated
Technology for Wireless Communications


M. Vidhya
1
, M.E.,
ECE. Valliammai Engineering College
Kancheepuram, India
vidhyamh@gmail.com
Mr. S. Ramesh
2
, M.Tech.,(Ph.D), AP (Sel.G)
ECE. Valliammai Engineering College
Kancheepuram, India
rameshsvk@gmail.com


AbstractA high gain, low cost, and efficient antenna is
designed using the concept of Substrate Integrated Waveguide
(SIW) and Antipodal Linearly Tapered Slot Antenna (ALTSA)
for wireless communications. Antipodal designs are easy to
match with the feeding systems. The metallization of either side
of the substrate is flared in opposite direction to form the tapered
slots. SIW is used as the feeding system. SIW consists of substrate
with metalized vias acting as two side walls in
a dielectric substrate by densely arraying metallized posts or via-
holes which connect the upper and lower metal plates of the
substrate. The proposed antenna can be designed using
commercial 3D Electromagnetic Simulation software- Computer
System Technology (CST). The parameters to be measured are
Return loss, VSWR, Gain & Radiation pattern.
KeywordsAntipodal linearly tapered slot antenna; Dielectric
loading; Substrate integrated waveguide.
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to the easy integration and large bandwidth
requirements, Tapered Slot Antenna (TSA) is chosen to be the
antenna configuration that will be studied within the scope of
this work. Tapered slot antennas (TSA) [1-2] are travelling
wave antennas. In general, all antennas whose voltage or
current distribution can be modeled by one or more travelling
waves are called travelling wave (nonresonant) antennas.
Tapered slot antenna uses a slot line etched on a dielectric
material, which is widening through its length to produce an
endfire radiation. An electromagnetic wave propagates
through the surface of the antenna substrate with a velocity
less than the speed of light which makes TSAs gain slow wave
antenna properties. The EM wave moves along the
increasingly separated metallization tapers until the separation
is such that the wave detaches from the antenna structure and
radiates into the free space from the substrate end. The E-
plane of the antenna is the plane containing the electric field
vectors of the radiated electromagnetic (EM) waves. For
TSAs, this is parallel to the substrate since the electric field is
established between two conductors that are separated by the
tapered slot. The H plane, the plane containing the magnetic
component of the radiated EM wave runs perpendicular to the
substrate.These three main types of TSAs are compared [2] in
terms of beamwidths and side lobe levels. Three types are
Constant width tapered slot antenna (CWSA), Linearly
Tapered Slot Antenna (LTSA), Vivaldi tapered slot antenna
(VTSA).
For a TSA with the same antenna length, aperture width
and substrate parameters, CWSA has the narrowest
beamwidth, followed by LTSA and then Vivaldi. The sidelobe
levels are highest for CWSA, followed by LTSA and then
Vivaldi. So a transition between the LTSA and CWSA
structures could provide reconfigurability about antenna
beamwidth and sidelobe levels. LTSA [2] consists of a slot
line that gets wider linearly through the antenna length. There
are basically three main parameters that determine the
radiation characteristics of a LTSA [1]. These are Antenna
length (L), Aperture width (W), Ground extension (H). During
the literature survey about TSA, it is found that conventional
tapered slot antenna suffers from poor directivity in the lower
part of band. Consequently in this paper, it is aimed to
investigate the radiation characteristics of ALTSA and to
explore the possibility of improving the radiation pattern and
directivity of ALTSA.
A broadband high gain antipodal linearly tapered slot
antenna was designed with substrate integrated waveguide.
SIW was to build artificial channels using metallic vias within
the substrate to guide the waves. SIW [3] is to remove the
bandwidth limitation. A tapered slot antenna uses a slot line
etched on a dielectric material, to produce an endfire radiation.
ALTSAs [4] have moderately high directivity (on the order of
10-17 dBi) and narrow beamwidth. Thus entire structure is
easy to fabricate in a planar single layer substrate resulting in
low cost and easy fabrication. Advantage of this antenna is
high gain and lower side lobe level. In order to increase the
gain and reduce the side lobe level, dielectric loading [5]-[6]
are added. Dielectric slab is designed with same dielectric
constant and thickness of the antenna substrate. Now the
antenna has shorter structure, easy to fabricate and high gain.
II. DESIGN OF ALTSA

The proposed antenna structure in this work is designed on a
Rogers Duroid5880 substrate with a dielectric constant of 2.98
at 7 GHz. In this demonstration, a relatively thick substrate is
used to lower the conductor loss of SIW and also to facilitate
International Conference on Computational Systems in Engineering and Technology, March 7 & 8 2014, Chennai

the fabrication process. The design procedure of SIW that was
presented is utilized to calculate the spacing between two
adjacent vias (S) and the width of SIW (W).
In ALTSA, Antipodal doubles the input impedance of the
LTSA. It has better VSWR or S11.Cross polarization levels
are higher in antipodal designs. Antipodal designs are easy to
match with the feeding systems. This is required to rotate the
SIW E-field, which is perpendicular to the substrate as it
would be within the equivalent waveguide structure. The
antipodal flares ensure that this field is translated into the E
plane of the LTSA as the flares become more and more
separated, the horizontal electric field is rotated into the
vertical H plane parallel to the antenna substrate. The
metallization of either side of the substrate is flared in
opposite direction to form the tapered slots. To solve a
potential mismatch problem, the flaring metals are designed to
overlap with each other is shown in Fig. 1. Then, the proposed
antenna has higher gain and also shorter structure, but it has a
wider configuration.



Fig. 1. Structure of ALTSA antenna.


Aperture width of the slot is given by




(2)

Where thickness of the substrate (t)- 0.8 mm, Dielectric
constant ( ) - 2.98, H-Height of the substrate.

Length of the tapered slot antenna is given by

(3)
(4)
In high frequency applications, microstrip devices are
not efficient, and because wavelength at high frequencies are
small, microstrip device manufacturing requires very tight
tolerances. At high frequencies waveguide devices are
preferred; however their manufacturing process is difficult.
Therefore a new concept emerged: substrate integrated
waveguide. SIW is a transition between microstrip and
dielectric-filled waveguide (DFW). Dielectric filled
waveguide is converted to substrate integrated waveguide
(SIW) by the help of vias for the side walls of the waveguide
as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Dimensions for SIW.

For a rectangular waveguide, cut off frequency of arbitrary
mode is found by the following formula

(5)
Where c is speed of light, m and n are mode numbers, a and b
are dimensions of the waveguide.
For TE
10
mode, the much-simplified version of this formula is

(6)

For DFW with same cut off frequency, dimension is found by
(7)

Having determined the dimension for the DFW the design
equations for SIW is as follows
(8)
In published articles about SIW design, the following two
conditions are required.
(9)
Where guided wavelength is expressed as follows.
(10)
( )
(1) t 25 . 1
41 . 1 33 . 0 exp
H 48 . 7
w
+
=
r
c
r
c
o
003 . 0 H >>
eff r
f
c
c 2
L =
( )
r eff r
c c c s s +1
2
1
2 2
b
n
a
m
2
|
.
|

\
|
+ |
.
|

\
|
=
t
c
f
c
a
c
f
c
2
=
r
d
a
a
c
=
s
a
p
d
a a
d s
95 . 0
2
+ =
5
g
d

< d p 2 <
( )
2
2
2
2
2
|
.
|

\
|

=
a
c
f
r
g
t t c
t

International Conference on Computational Systems in Engineering and Technology, March 7 & 8 2014, Chennai

SIW devices can be thought as a form of dielectric filled
waveguide (DFW), therefore the starting point can be DFW.
For TE
10
mode, the dimension "b" is not important as it does
not affect the cut off frequency of the waveguide. Therefore
the substrate can be at any thickness; it only affects the
dielectric loss (thicker=lower loss).
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
SIW fed LTSA is simulated using CST. For this
particular antenna, the results taken into considerations were
Return Loss, VSWR, Radiation Pattern and Gain of the
antenna. The maximum gain of 4.275 dBi was obtained for a
single element antenna. Fig. 3 shows the measured return loss
of the SIW fed ALTSA. The S11 is -20 dbi at 7GHz. From
this result, the resonance frequency of the proposed antenna is
7 GHz.
TABLE I. Dimensions of ALTSA antenna.

PARAMETER VALUES
Frequency 7 GHZ
Impedence 50
Substrate Rogers RT 5880
Slot length 6 mm
Slot Width 5 mm
Tapered Length 15 mm




Fig. 3. |S11| of ALTSA.

Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 shows the measured VSWR and
radiation pattern of the SIW fed ALTSA. The VSWR is 1.3 at
7 GHz. Fig. 6 shows the far field of ALTSA and Table. I gives
the dimensions of the Antipodal linearly tapered slot antenna.
The proposed antenna is designed for wireless applications
operating at 7GHz. Antenna is designed using Rogers RT
Duroid 58880 substrate.


Fig. 4. VSWR of ALTSA Antenna.
















Fig. 5. ALTSA radiation pattern.





Fig. 6 Far field of ALTSA.




International Conference on Computational Systems in Engineering and Technology, March 7 & 8 2014, Chennai

IV. CONCLUSION

The SIW fed antipodal linearly tapered slot antenna
operating at 7 GHz for wireless communications have been
studied and optimized in this paper. It is designed on a Rogers
Duroid5880 substrate with a dielectric constant of 2.98. The
SIW and ALTSA are jointly used to design a low cost, high
gain and efficient antenna. It has better VSWR or S11. Cross
polarization levels are higher in antipodal designs. This
antenna structure can easily be transplanted into higher
frequency range. The low cost printed circuit board process is
used to fabricate the antenna structure in single layer structure.


REFERENCES

1. Nasser Ghassemi, Ke Wu, PlanarHigh gain dielectric-loaded
Antipodal linearly tapered slot antenna for E- and W-Band
Gigabyte point-to-point Wireless Services, IEEE Transactions
on Antennas and Propogation, Vol 61, pp. 1747-1755, April 2013.

2. Vivek Unadkat, VedVyas Dwivedi, Design of Corrugated
Linearly Tapered Slot Antenna for Wireless Application,
Germany, LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, June 2013.

3. R.Kazemi, E.Fathy, and R. Sadaghzadeh, Dielectric rod antenna
array with substrate integrated waveguide planar feed network for
wideband applications, IEEE Transactionson Antenna and
Propogation., Vol. 60, no. 3, pp.1312-1319, March. 2012.


4. Lev Pazin and Yehuda Leviatan, "A Compact 60-GHz Tapered
Slot Antenna Printed on LCP Substrate for WPAN Applications"
,IEEE antennas and wireless propogation letters, Vol 9, pp.272-
275, 2010.
5. Z.Wang, C.C. Chiau, X. Chen, B.B.S. Collins, S. P. Kingsley,
S.C. Puckey, Broadband dielectric loaded trapezoidal planar
antenna, APMC Proceedings, Vol 4, 2005.
6. Chung-Tung Cheung, Cheh Ming-Liu, Po-Aun sung, David B.
Rutledge, A Novel Dielectric Loaded Antenna For Wireless
Applications, Antennas and Propagation Society International
Symposium, Vol 1, pp. 38-41, 1999.
7. H. Wang, D.-G. Fang, B. Zhang, and W.-Q. Che, Dielectric
loaded substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) H-plane horn
antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 640
647, Mar. 2010.

8. D. Deslandes and K.Wu, Integrated microstrip and rectangular
waveguide in planar form, IEEE Microw. Wireless Compon.
Lett., vol. 11, pp. 6870, Feb. 2001.

9. D. Stephens, P. R. Young, and I. D. Robertson, W-band
substrate integrated waveguide slot antenna, Electron. Lett., vol.
41, no. 4, pp. 165167, Feb. 2005.

10. Lev Pazin and Yehuda Leviatan, "A Compact 60-GHz Tapered
Slot Antenna Printed on LCP Substrate for WPAN Applications"
,IEEE antennas and wireless propogation letters, Vol 9, pp.272-
275, 2010.