Design of an Archimedean Spiral Antenna

Baixiao Wang1, Aixin Chen

School of Electronics and Information Engineering, BUAA
EMC Lab, Beijing, 100083, China
1
wbxapple@ee.buaa.edu.cn

Abstract— The Archimedean spiral antennas are widely used as

a kind of broad-bandwidth antennas. This paper presents an
Archimedean spiral antenna and its directivity performance. A
metal cavity is used to reflect unwanted power in order to get
unidirectional pattern. To overcome the bandwidth limitation of
the hollow metal cavity, the cavity with three metal plates are
proposed, and the simulation results show that good antenna
performance is obtained within a broad bandwidth.

I. INTRODUCTION
The Archimedean spiral antennas are widely used as a kind
of broad-bandwidth antennas. They radiate to the both sides of
the spiral plane, whereas the unidirectional pattern is required
in many situations. Cavities are usually utilized to achieve this
purpose. The cavity may be a hollow metal cylinder. The
depth of cylinder is usually ¬/4, where the wavelength¬
corresponds to the central frequency of the operating band.
Obviously, its bandwidth is restricted. To gain broad Fig. 1 The Archimedean spiral antenna
bandwidth, an absorber is usually loaded in the cavity to
absorb all the undesired radiation in that direction. This kind
of spiral can easily realise broad bandwidth, for example 2- According to the hand rules, the antenna radiates right hand
18GHz. However, the half of the power will be dissipated in circular (RHC) polarization on one side (+z direction) and left
the cavity. So the absorber won’t be effective in some hand circular (LHC) polarization on the other side (-z
situations. direction). The directivity performance is mainly considered
In this paper, an Archimedean spiral antenna operating at 2- in this paper and the on-axis (+z direction) values are taken.
18GHz band is firstly given. To compare the directivities, the The input impedance and radiation pattern can refer to the
spiral with hollow cavity is simulated. And finally, a designed journal article in [3]. The directivity of the spiral is shown in
cavity with three plates is designed for the Archimedean spiral Fig.2. It can be seen that the directivity is about 4~6 dB in the
antenna. The plates are placed properly in the hollow cavity whole bandwidth and drops rapidly when the frequency is
and good performance is obtained. below 2GHz.

II. THE ARCHIMEDEAN SPIRAL ANTENNA

The structure of the two-arm Archimedean spiral antenna is
shown in fig.1. To get good frequency-independent
characteristics, the antenna is self-complementary, that is, the
strip width of each arm is equal to the slot width. The antenna
design procedure is followed by the antenna handbook ([1],
[2]) and will not be detailed here. The antenna works at
2GHz-18GHz. To obtain good performance at the high
frequency, the inner radius is set to be 1.2mm. The outer
radius is 30mm, which is large enough to ensure low
frequency performance. Each arm has 12 turns. The arm strip
width is 0.6mm. The antenna is fed at the centre of the
structure.

Fig. 2 The on-axis directivity of the antenna

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978-1-4244-2193-0/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE


 III. THE CAVITY-BACKED SPIRAL ANTENNA
The spiral antenna radiates to both sides of the antenna
plane. In many applications, unidirectional pattern is usually
desired. For example, RHC wave is commonly used in
satellite communication. One simple way is placing absorbing
material at one side of the antenna to dissipate the unwanted
power, as in [4]. Another feasible way is using conducting
plane reflector, which has better gain performance. Reference
[5] shows a detailed analysis. In this paper, the antenna with
hollow cavity is firstly given. And to get broad bandwidth
performance, three metal plates are placed properly in the
cavity.
A. The Spiral with Hollow Cavity
A hollow metal cylinder cavity shown in fig.3 is firstly
presented. The wave reflected from the cavity base partly
couples into the spiral, which will deteriorate the antenna
performance, especially at the low frequency. One way to Fig. 4 The directivity of the hollow cavity-backed antenna
overcome this problem is adding resistive load to the end of It can be seen that the hollow metal cavity has bandwidth
each spiral arm (e.g. [6]). The load reduces reflections from limitation, and to realise broad band characteristics, addition
the end of each arm and improves the low frequency VSWR measures should be taken.
and axial ratio. Therefore, two loads are added at the out circle
of each arm. B. The Spiral Antenna with Cavity Loaded by Plates
The depth of the cavity is 25mm, which is equal to the To make the antenna works well over the whole bandwidth,
quarter wavelength of the frequency 3GHz. According to the three metal plates are placed properly in the cavity, as shown
image theory, the antenna should work well at and near the in fig. 5. Basically speaking, the plates play a rule of reflectors.
frequency of 3GHz. The main task is to determine two groups of parameters. One
is the distance of plates to the spiral. And the other is the
radiuses of the plates.
The distances are firstly chosen. The values are 15mm,
10mm and 7.5mm respectively, which are equal to the quarter
wavelength of 5GHz, 7.5GHz and 10GHz respectively.
The values of the radius are optimized through EM
software. And the final radiuses of the three plates are chosen
to be 13mm, 9.1mm and 7.4 mm.

Fig. 3 The antenna with hollow cavity

Fig.4 is the directivity of the antenna with a hollow cavity.

It can be seen that the antenna works well around the band
near 3GHz, 9GHz and 15GHz. At these regions the reflected
wave from the base of the cavity and the wave directly
radiated from the spiral are in phase in the +z direction. On
the other hand, the antenna’s directivity is very low around the
band close to 6GHz, 12GHz and 18GHz. The reason is that Fig. 5 The antenna with the cavity loaded by plates
the reflected wave and the directly radiated wave are out of
phase and cancel each other in the +z direction.


 The simulation directivity of the final antenna is shown in
fig.6. The directivity over the whole bandwidth is basically
above 7dB and just within some small regions the directivity
is below 7dB. Also the values have some fluctuation, which
should be caused by the edge of the conducting plates.
The axial ratio, shown in fig. 7, is below 3dB over 2-
18GHz and good RHC polarization is obtained.

Fig. 8 The directivity pattern at f=2GHz

Fig. 6 The directivity of the antenna with the cavity loaded by plates

Fig. 9 The directivity pattern at f=9GHz

Fig. 7 The on-axis AR of the antenna with the cavity loaded by plates

The typical radiation patterns of the antenna are shown in

fig. 8-10. The values are taken at the frequencies of 2GHz,
9GHz and 18GHz respectively.

Fig. 10 The directivity pattern at f=18GHz


 IV. CONCLUSIONS
An Archimedean spiral antenna is designed, it radiates to
both sides of the spiral plane. To obtain unidirectional
radiation pattern and high gain performance, a hollow metal
cavity is backed; however, it can not normally work at and
near some frequencies. The cavity loaded by three plates
overcomes the problem and the results show good antenna
performance within the broad bandwidth The way presented
here can be seen a tip for further considerations in the spiral
antenna design.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Wang Yi and Chen Yao are gratefully acknowledged for
their helpful discussions and constructive suggestions on this
paper.
REFERENCES
[1] Lin Changlu, Antenna Engineering Handbook, Publishing House of
Electronics Industry, China, Bejing, 2002
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[6] H. Nakano et al, “A Low Profile Archimedean Spiral Antenna”, IEEE
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453