Miniaturized Circularly Polarized L-Shaped Slot

Antenna for Ultra-wideband Applications

Gurpreet Kumar1, Gurpreet Singh Saini2,, Rajeev Kumar3

Abstract— A miniaturized microstrip-fed, wideband and circularly polarized L-shaped slot antenna is designed for ultra-
wideband applications. To realize L-shaped slot antenna with wide impedance bandwidth, a stub of size 10.7 mm2 is added
to a rectangular shaped slot of the ground plane. The position of the feed-line is optimized to attain wide circular
polarization bandwidth. The size of the proposed antenna is very small i.e., 25×25 mm2. A prototype of the proposed
design is fabricated and tested. The proposed antenna achieves the impedance bandwidth (S11<-10 dB) and axial ratio
bandwidth (ARBW< 3 dB) of 7.4 GHz (from 2.5 GHz to 9.9 GHz) and 2.2 GHz (from 6.2 GHz to 8.4 GHz), respectively.
Moreover, the antenna achieves the stable radiation pattern and a gain of more than 2.8 dBi over the entire axial ratio
bandwidth. The advantages of the proposed antenna are small in size, having wide impedance bandwidth and broad
ARBW.

Keywords—circular polarization, wideband antenna, a slot antenna, axial ratio bandwidth

I. INTRODUCTION
The circular polarization (CP) is an essential feature for ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas. But, it is rather difficult to achieve than
general polarization such as elliptical polarization etc. Traditionally, for point to point satellite communication, the circularly
polarized antennas were used but they are bulky and not having space constraint for ex. Archimedean Spiral, Yagi-Udas, and
Crossed dipoles. Now the researchers adopt the microstrip patch antennas due to the rapid growth in wireless communication and
other portable devices. Moreover, the spectrum released by the Commission of Federal Communication (FCC) for the operations
of Personal Area Network (PAN) which increases the demand of the microstrip patch antennas while at the same time offering the
various advantages such as compact in size, large impedance bandwidth (BW), robustness and nearly omnidirectional pattern of
radiation which is suitable for various applications in UWB region.

Interestingly, the circularly polarized microstrip patch antennas emerged due to its capability of multipath fading, higher data rate
and also flexible receiver orientation is allowed. Since for ideal circular polarization, the patch antennas are being studied. Among
the variety of design being studied, the slot antenna with microstrip-feed can be considered as an excellent candidate since it has
good radiation pattern and easily compatible with monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC).

A variety of CP slot antennas have appeared in the recent past. In [1], a trapezoidal shape slot antenna is designed to achieve a CP
band of 1.77 GHz. In [2], a CP antenna with slot has been investigated which provides a 1575 MHz of CP band. Further in [3], an
antenna with stair-shaped slot has been presented which gives a CP band of 850 MHz and in [4] a square slot is used to design an
antenna that gives a CP band of 1.4 GHz. But in [5], a hexagonally shaped antenna gave a CP band of 1.5 GHz. Finally, a
comparison list of the CP slot antenna from the literature is given in table 1.

In this paper, a miniaturized slot antenna of size 25×25 mm2 has been designed and verified. The proposed prototype achieves the
better impedance BW and ARBW of 7.4 GHz (2.5 GHz to 9.9 GHz) and 2.2 GHz (6.2 GHz-8.4 GHz) respectively. The design
comprises of a rectangular slot and a microstrip feed-line on either side of the substrate. Furthermore, in order to achieve the
enhanced impedance BW, a rectangular shaped slot is modified by adding a stub of size 10.7 mm 2 from the right side of the
ground plane of the antenna toward its center. Moreover, the radiation pattern of the antenna is stable over the complete CP
frequency band. A comparison of the proposed design with the reference antennas is listed in Table I. As seen from Table 1 that
the proposed design has better performance over the reference antennas in terms of size, ARBW and, impedance bandwidth. The
CST Microwave Studio is used to evaluate the performance of the antenna.
 Table 1: A list of the circularly polarized antennas with size, ARBW and impedance bandwidth

Reference No. Authors Publication Year Antenna Size ARBW (GHz) Impedance
(mm2) bandwidth
(GHz)
4 J-Y. Sze et al. 2010 60 × 60 1.40 1.34

5 S-W. Zhou et al. 2011 62 × 62 1.50 2.70

6 J-Y. Jan et al. 2013 50 × 50 1.20 5.00

7 J.K. Luo et al. 2015 60×60 0.70 1.08

8 R.K. Saini et al. 2016 60×60 1.90 1.70

9 Q.X. Chu et al. 2013 60×60 0.80 1.10

10 J-S. Row et al. 2014 56×23 0.11 0.62

11 J-L. Guo et al. 2018 53×44.7 1.77 3.93

12 T-H. Ko et al. 2018 45×20 0.20 0.82

13 Y. Cao et al. 2017 40×40 1.50 1.97

14 Hu et al. 2015 67×67 1.80 2.46

15 Xue et al. 2015 120×100 0.97 1.38

16 S.T. Van et al. 2018 54×54 2.06 2.29

17 W. He et al. 2016 50×50 0.79 0.90

18 Nasimuddin et al. 2012 60×60 1.85 3.00

This paper is organized as follow: Introduction and the literature review are presented in section 1. The proposed antenna
structure is described in Section 2. The result and discussion are given in Section 3. Finally, the conclusion of the work is
presented in Section 4.

II. ANTENNA DESIGN

A. Antenna design and parameters

The dimensions of the design are given in Fig. 1. The antenna is designed on a commercially cheap FR4 substrate having a
thickness of 1.6 mm, dielectric constant (ɛr) of 4.4 and a loss tangent of 0.0019. Firstly, the rectangular slot of 16×21.7 mm2 is
made on the ground plane of the antenna and then to achieve the enhanced impedance bandwidth, a stub of size 10.7 mm is added
from the right side of the ground plane toward its center which forms the L-shape slot in the ground plane of the antenna.
Furthermore, to overcome the coupling between the ground plane and feedline, a small slot of W2 is made at the bottom part of
the ground plane as shown in Fig. 1. Moreover, the position of the microstrip line is optimized to realize wideband circularly
polarized operation (ARBW). The parameter dimensions of the design are given in Table 2.
 (a) (b)
Fig.1. Configuration of the antenna.(a)Top view (b) Bottom view

Table 2: Parameters with size in mm

Parameters (mm) Parameters (mm)
W1 25 W8 13.5
W2 3 L1 25
W3 4.3 L2 4.8
W4 10 L3 5.25
W5 9.5 L4 10.75
W6 1 L5 15
W7 3 L6 9.75

B. Parametric analysis
Figure 2 shows the different modifications in the antenna design which provides the improvement in the bandwidth and CP
characteristics of the design. The design of the three antennas is being shown in figure 2, the Antenna1 (Ant1) with a rectangular
slot and a centred positioned microstrip feedline on either side of the substrate and then to enhance the impedance BW, a stub is
added from the right side of the ground plane toward its centre, as shown in the curve of Fig. 3 of Antenna2 (Ant2). Furthermore,
to achieve wideband circular polarization (ARBW), the feedline is shifted towards the right edge from the center of the Antenna
2, as shown in the curve of Fig. 3 of Antenna 3 (Ant3).

(a) Ant1 (b) Ant2 (c) Ant3

Fig. 2 Enhancement of proposed antenna (a) Ant1 (b) Ant2 (c) Ant3
For the mathematical analysis of the antenna design, the perimeter of the slot (Sp) is calculated from the Fig. 1 and represented by
the following equation

(1)

After calculating the value of Sp, the first harmonic of the resonance frequency is calculated using the following equation

(2)
In the above equation, fr1 represents the first resonance frequency; c represents the velocity of light and ɛeff is the effective
dielectric constant. The ɛeff is calculated using the following equation

(3)

Where the second part of the eq. (3) is having very small value so it neglected from the calculation of ɛeff and the eq. (3) becomes
approximately equal to ɛr+1/2 only. The first harmonic of resonance frequency (fr1) is calculated using eq.(1) i.e., 2.29 GHz is
shown by the curve of Ant3 in Fig. 3. Similarly, second, third and fourth harmonics of the resonance frequency are calculated as
4.58 GHz, 6.89 GHz, and 9.18 GHz, respectively as shown by the curve of Ant3 in Fig. 3. The resonance frequency values of
harmonics are approximately equal to the simulated resonant frequency values of Ant3.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

The simulated reflection coefficient (S11) and axial ratio of Ant 1, Ant 2 and Ant 3 are illustrated in Fig. 3 and 4 respectively. It
can be seen from the figure 3 that the Ant 2 has the greater impedance bandwidth, i.e., 2.5 to 11 GHz, comparatively to Ant 1 and
Ant 3.
But conversely, the axial ratio bandwidth of Ant 2 is less as compared to Ant 3 as represented in figure 4. So at this stage of the
proposed antenna i.e., Ant 2 there is an also a requirement of broad axial ratio bandwidth (ARBW). To fulfill this requirement, the
microstrip feed-line is optimized by shifting it toward the right edge from the center of the Ant 2, as depicted in Fig.2(c). Shifting
of feed-line provides a remarkable improvement in the axial ratio bandwidth and this is due to the fact that horizontal electric field
vector (EHOR) of the stub has a phase difference (PD) of nearly 90 with the vertical electric field vector (EVER) of slot radiator and
the CP wave is developed for a large range of frequency. So finally Ant 3 has achieved the broadband ARBW of 2.2 GHz from
the frequency range of 6.2-8.6 GHz and also achieves the wide impedance bandwidth of 7.4 GHz ranges from 2.5 - 9.9 GHz as
shown in figure 3 and 4 respectively. Moreover, for the indicative purpose, the Ant 1 axial ratio (> 9 dB) is not shown in figure 4.
.

Fig. 3 Reflection Coefficient (S11) of Ant 1, Ant 2 and Ant 3 Fig. 4 Axial Ratio of Ant 2 and Ant 3
 (a) (b)

Fig. 4 Fabricated antenna (a) bottom view (b) top view

Fig. 5 Measurement of antenna performance with MS46322A vector network analyzer

For the experimental verification of the design, the prototype of antenna 3 has been fabricated and measured with Vector Network
Analyzer (MS46322A) are shown in figure 4 and 5 respectively. To feed the antenna a female edge-mounted SMA connector is
attached to the prototype of Ant 3.
The measured axial ratio and reflection coefficient (S11) of Ant 3 is illustrated in figure 6 (a) and 6 (b) respectively and seems to
be in good agreement with each other. But due to fabrication and connector losses, the measured impedance BW of design is
slightly shifted towards the higher region of the frequency, whereas the measured axial ratio bandwidth moves a little towards the
lower frequency region as shown in figure 6.
0

-5

-10
s11
(dB) -15
-20
Measured
-25
Simulated
-30
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Frequency (GHz)
(a) (b)
Fig. 6 Simulated and measured (a) Reflection co-efficient (S11) (b) Axial ratio of Ant3
 (a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 7 Surface current distributions on ground and feed of Ant3 at (a) 0 (b) 90 (c) 180 (d) 270

The simulated surface current distribution of an Ant 3 at 7 GHz frequency is illustrated in figure 7. It can be clearly observed from
the figure that the time-varying surface current distribution are similar at a phase angle of 180 and 270 whereas inverse in phase
at 0 and 90 . Therefore, it is evident that the proposed design is Right Hand Circularly Polarized (RHCP) in –z-direction and Left
Hand Circularly Polarized (LHCP) in the +z direction.

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

Fig. 8 Measured and simulated results at a frequency of 7.5 GHz for (a) E-plane (b) H-plane and 8.5 GHz (c) E-plane (d) H-
plane
The radiation patterns of the design are shown in figure 8. The E and H planes Radiation patterns of the antenna are shown at two
frequencies i.e., 7.5 GHz and 8.5 GHz. It is observed from the Fig. 8. that the LHCP and RHCP radiation pattern of E-plane and
H-plane are found to be nearly omnidirectional. The measured and simulated radiation patterns are almost similar to each other
with only minor discrepancies due to fabrication losses.

Fig. 9 Measured and simulated gain of the antenna

The Measured and simulated peak gains of the design is given in Fig. 9. The simulated gain of the antenna is varied from 2.1-4.8
dB whereas the range of measured gain varies from 1.7-3.1 dB within ARBW. Moreover, the percentage efficiency (ɳ) of the
antenna varies within a frequency range of 4 to 10 GHz as given in Fig. 10. The maximum efficiency of the design is 83 % at a
frequency of 9 GHz.

100

80

60
ɳ (%)
40

20

0
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Frequency (GHz)
Fig. 10 Efficiency (ɳ) of the antenna

IV. CONCLUSION
A miniaturized, wideband, circularly polarized L-shaped slot antenna has been discussed in this paper. The wide impedance
bandwidth of 7.4 GHz is achieved by introducing a stub to a rectangular slot of the ground plane whereas the position of feed-line
is used to achieve the axial ratio BW of 2.2 GHz. Moreover, the proposed design has a stable gain and radiation pattern over an
entire ARBW. The compactness of the antenna makes it very much appropriate design for the indoor wireless application.

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