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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013

Directivity Improvement of Vivaldi Antenna Using

Double-Slot Structure
Ya-Wei Wang, Guang-Ming Wang, and Bin-Feng Zong

AbstractThe conventional Vivaldi antenna is known for its ultrawideband characteristic, but low directivity. In order to improve
the directivity, a double-slot structure is proposed to design a new
Vivaldi antenna. The two slots are excited in uniform amplitude and
phase by using a T-junction power divider. The double-slot structure can generate plane-like waves in the E-plane of the antenna.
As a result, directivity of the double-slot Vivaldi antenna is significantly improved by comparison to a conventional Vivaldi antenna
of the same size. The measured results show that impedance bandwidth of the double-slot Vivaldi antenna is from 2.5 to 15 GHz. Gain
and directivity of the proposed antenna is considerably improved at
the frequencies above 6 GHz. Furthermore, the main beam splitting
at high frequencies of the conventional Vivaldi antenna on thick
dielectric substrates is eliminated by the double-slot structure.
Index TermsDouble-slot structure, high directivity, Vivaldi
antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE VIVALDI antenna, which was first described by

Gibson in 1979 [1], has been widely studied and applied due to its simple structure, light weight, wide band, high
efficiency, and high gain. It has been utilized in many ultrawideband (UWB) applications, such as ground penetrating radar [2],
radio astronomy [3], UWB imaging system [4], etc. The Vivaldi
antenna is a traveling-wave endfire planar antenna featuring
wide bandwidth. However, the directivity of a conventional
Vivaldi antenna is low, and the main beams at high frequencies
will split when the Vivaldi antenna is etched on thick dielectric
substrates [5]. In order to improve the directivity, some approaches have been proposed. Using array of Vivaldi [3] is the
conventional way to obtain high directivity, but it is complicated, costly, and bulky for some applications. Using photonic
band-gap structure that can be formed by micromachining the
substrate with holes [6] or placing conductor strip gratings on
both sides of the substrate [7], this method is also complicated
because of the need to optimize the parameters of the holes and
metal strips. Another method is to employ a director in the
aperture of the tapered slot, which can focus the energy in the
endfire direction and improve the directivity. The director
can be formed using dielectric that has a higher permittivity
than the antenna substrate [8] or anisotropic zero-index metamaterials on both sides of the antenna substrate [9]. However,

Fig. 1. (a) Structure of the proposed DSVA. (b) Structure of the CVA.

the dielectric director is costly, and the anisotropic zero-index

metamaterials are complicated to construct. Furthermore, the
anisotropic zero-index metamaterials can only improve directivity of the Vivaldi antenna in a narrow band (9.510.5 GHz).
In this letter, a double-slot structure is proposed to develop a
novel Vivaldi antenna with high directivity in an ultrawideband.
The double-slot structure makes the aperture field distribution at
the end of the antenna more uniform, thus the gain of the proposed antenna is higher than that of a conventional Vivaldi antenna with the same size. It is more important that the proposed
structure is far simpler than those mentioned in [5][9].
II. ANTENNA DESIGN

Manuscript received June 22, 2013; revised September 23, 2013; accepted
October 03, 2013. Date of publication October 09, 2013; date of current version
October 29, 2013. This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of Chinaunder Grant 60971118.
The authors are with the Air-Defense and Antimissile Institute, University of
Airforce Engineering, Xian 710051, China (e-mail: wywafeu@163.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2013.2285182

Configuration of the proposed double-slot Vivaldi antenna

(DSVA) is shown in Fig. 1(a), and configuration of a conventional Vivaldi antenna (CVA) is shown in Fig. 1(b). Structural
parameters are listed in Table I, which have already been
optimized. Dimensions of the two antennas are set to be
80 150 mm . As shown in Fig. 1(a), the tapered slot of the
, and
DSVA consists of four exponential curves:

1536-1225 2013 IEEE

WANG et al.: DIRECTIVITY IMPROVEMENT OF VIVALDI ANTENNA USING DOUBLE-SLOT STRUCTURE

Fig. 2. Simulated results of the DSVA and the CVA at 10 GHz. (a) E-plane radiation pattern. (b) H-plane radiation pattern. (c) E-field distributions in -plane.

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Fig. 3. Fabricated samples and measured reflection coefficients. (a) Photograph

of the fabricated DSVA. (b) Photograph of the fabricated CVA. (c) Measured
reflection coefficients of the DSVA and the CSA.

TABLE I
STRUCTURE PARAMETERS OF THE DSVA AND THE CVA

(2)

(3)

(4)

. Using structure parameters in Table I, the four exponential

curves can be described by the following equations:

(1)

Microstrip/slotline transitions are used to feed slots of the two

antennas. A T-junction power divider makes the two slots of the
DSVA be excited in uniform amplitude and phase. An exponential taper is used for the CVA to transform 100 to 50 . The
dielectric substrate used here is chosen as F4B with the permittivity of 2.65 and tangent loss of 0.001. Thickness of the dielectric substrate is 1 mm.

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013

TABLE II
MEASURED RADIATION PATTERNS OF THE DSVA AND THE CVA

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In order to illustrate the mechanism about how the double-slot
structure improves its directivity, the simulated radiation patterns in E-plane and H-plane of 10 GHz are shown in Fig. 2. As
shown in Fig. 2(a) and (b), cross-polarization radiation patterns
of the two antennas are close to each other both in E-plane and
H-plane, Fig. 2(b) also depicts that the copolarization radiation
patterns of the two antennas have little difference between their
main beams. The remarkable difference exists between copolarizations in E-plane of the two antennas, as shown in Fig. 2(a);
a significant improvement of directivity is obviously obtained
by the double-slot structure. From the E-field distributions in
-plane shown in Fig. 2(c), we can clearly observe that the
CVA generates spherical-like waves that result in low directivity, while the DSVA generates plane-like waves that produce

high directivity, and this gives root cause for the high directivity
performance of the proposed DSVA.
For validating the effectiveness of the double-slot structure
to improve directivity of the Vivaldi antenna, both the DSVA
and the CVA are fabricated and measured. Fig. 3 shows fabricated samples of the two antennas and the measured reflection
coefficients of them. As shown in Fig. 3(c), impedance band of
the CVA is from 2.2 to 14.5 GHz, and impedance band of the
proposed DSVA is from 2.5 to 15 GHz. This indicates that the
ultrawideband characteristic of the Vivaldi antenna is well kept
after replacing the conventional tapered slot with the proposed
double-slot.
Table II shows the measured radiation patterns in E-plane
and H-plane of 2.5, 10, and 15 GHz. The detailed comparisons
of measured antenna gain and half-power beamwidth (HPBW)
in E-plane of the DSVA and the CVA are shown in Table III.

WANG et al.: DIRECTIVITY IMPROVEMENT OF VIVALDI ANTENNA USING DOUBLE-SLOT STRUCTURE

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TABLE III
MEASURED RADIATION PATTERNS OF THE DSVA AND THE CVA

From Tables II and III, we know that the gain and directivity
of the DSVA is higher than those of the CVA at high frequencies. Furthermore, the double-slot structure of the DSVA reduces the main beam splitting at high frequencies. Moreover,
the reduction of the gain at high frequencies can attribute to the
high cross-polarization level. Additionally, sidelobe level of the
DSVA must be better than the two-element array made of the
Vivaldi antenna with the size of 40 140 mm , especially at
high frequencies. For example, sidelobe level of the DSVA at
15 GHz is 13 dB, which must be better than that of the two-element array with
distance at 15 GHz.
Compared to the antenna (with the size of 80 140 mm )
proposed in [9], the DSVA can improve the directivity better and
in a wider band. The measured gain and HPBW for 10 GHz of
the antenna in [9] are 14 dB and 22.8 , respectively, and those of
the DSVA in this letter are 14.5 dB and 21.5 , respectively. Additionally, improvement of directivity is restricted by the bandwidth of the anisotropic zero-index metamaterials in [9], but
the DSVA can improve the directivity at the frequencies above
6 GHz and reduce the main beam splitting at high frequencies.
Moreover, the structure of the DSVA is much simpler than that
of the antenna in [9].
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a double-slot Vivaldi antenna is proposed. The
double-slot structure makes the E-field distribution at the aperture of the proposed antenna seem like a plane wave, as a result

of which the directivity of the proposed DSVA is improved. The

measured results of both the DSVA and a conventional Vivaldi
antenna verify the significant improvement. The much simpler
structure of the DSVA makes itself good for broad applications.
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[1] P. J. Gibson, The Vivaldi aerial, in Proc. 9th Eur. Microw. Conf.,
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[2] F. Zhang, G. Y. Fang, Y. C. Ji, H. J. Ju, and J. J. Shao, A novel compact
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