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6018 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO.

12, DECEMBER 2012

[11] S. K. Rajgopal and S. K. Sharma, “Investigations on ultrawideband


pentagon shape microstrip slot antenna for wireless communications,”
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, no. 5, pp. 1353–1359, May
2009.
[12] P. C. Li, J. X. Liang, and X. D. Chen, “Study of printed elliptical/cir-
cular slot antenna for ultrawideband applications,” IEEE Trans. An-
tennas Propag., vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 1670–1675, Jun. 2006.
[13] S. W. Qu, C. L. Ruan, and B. Z. Wang, “Bandwidth enhancement of
wide-slot antenna fed by CPW and microstrip line,” IEEE Antennas
Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 5, pp. 15–17, 2006.
[14] P. V. Anob, K. P. Ray, and G. Kumar, “Wideband orthogonal square
monopole antenna with semi-circular base,” in Proc. IEEE Antennas
Propag. Soc. Int. Symp., Jul. 2001, vol. 3, pp. 294–297.
[15] X. H. Wu and A. A. Kishk, “Study of an ultrawideband omnidirectional
rolled monopole antenna with trapezoidal cuts,” IEEE Trans. Antennas
Propag., vol. 56, pp. 259–263, Jan. 2008.
[16] K. S. Ryu and A. A. Kishk, “UWB dielectric resonator antenna having
consistent omnidirectional pattern and low cross-polarization charac-
teristics,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 59, pp. 1403–1408, Apr.
2011.
[17] S. W. Qu, J. L. Li, and Q. Xue, “Broadband microstrip-line-fed wide
slot antenna with improved patterns,” Electron. Lett., vol. 42, no. 16,
pp. 893–894, Aug. 2006.
[18] S. W. Qu, J. L. Li, J. X. Chen, and Q. Xue, “Ultrawideband strip-loaded
circular slot antenna with improved radiation patterns,” IEEE Trans. Fig. 1. (a) A metamaterial slab with effective permittivity equal to zero under
Antennas Propag., vol. 55, no. 11, pp. 3348–3353, Nov. 2007. the incidence of an arbitrary wave; (b) the top view of the zero-index metama-
terial unit cell.

enhanced performance [1], [2]. Among different kinds of metamate-


rials, the zero-index metamaterial was developed by designing sub-
wavelength elements working within a frequency range where either
A High Gain Antenna With an Optimized Metamaterial the effective permittivity or the permeability of the structure is close to
Inspired Superstrate zero [3]–[9]. The phase variation of the electromagnetic waves entering
Dongying Li, Zsolt Szabó, Xianming Qing, Er-Ping Li, and these types of structures is extremely small [5]. Such a feature can be
Zhi Ning Chen exploited in various applications such as wave-tunneling through small
cross-sections with irregular shapes [5]–[7], cloaking [8], and lenses
[9]. In particular, the fact that the phase of the wave ‘freezes’ inside
Abstract—A metamaterial unit cell with a low refractive index over a a zero-index material suggests that the phase front of the wave exiting
wide frequency band is proposed and designed. The effective material pa-
rameters of the unit cell are extracted, and the unit cell forms a planar the structure always conforms with the material interface. If the exiting
three-layer metamaterial structure used as a superstrate for broadside gain material interface is flat, then the refracted wave is focused along the
enhancement of a patch antenna at 10 GHz. The proposed superstrate is op- direction perpendicular to the interface, shown in Fig. 1(a). This prop-
timized along with the antenna to enhance its beam-focusing ability, taking erty of the zero-index metamaterial can be exploited in a number of
into account the oblique wave incidence from the radiation source. Both
simulation and measurement of the antenna with the optimized superstrate
interesting applications such as phase transformation [3] and antenna
show that this configuration is able to achieve a broadside gain 70%–80% beam focusing [9].
of the maximum gain from the ideal effective radiation surface. In this communication, the antenna consisting of a patch antenna
Index Terms—Effective material parameters, high gain antennas, low with a metamaterial inspired superstrate is designed. The design pro-
index metamaterials. cedure has two steps. First, a zero-index metamaterial with a unit cell
of metallic strips printed on a substrate is characterized with the effec-
tive medium theory. Such a unit cell was first proposed in [10], [11] as
I. INTRODUCTION an electric-field-coupled (ELC) resonator. Here, the effective material
parameter extraction algorithm presented in [12] is employed to ob-
The development of metamaterials opened a new possibility for de- tain the effective refractive index from the scattering parameters, and it
signers to create a novel structure with unconventional properties or is designed by optimizing the geometry of the unit cell in such a way
to reduce the losses in the near-zero frequency range. The zero-index
Manuscript received January 11, 2012; revised May 24, 2012; accepted metamaterial design is validated with measurements by comparing the
July 30, 2012. Date of publication August 14, 2012; date of current version
magnitude and phase of the measured and calculated scattering param-
November 29, 2012. This work was supported by the A*STAR Metamaterials:
Meta-Antenna research programme under grant number A*STAR-SERC eters. Also, it is shown that the multiple stacked layers of the proposed
0921540097. unit cell has the same working frequency and slightly better bandwidth
D. Li and E.-P. Li are with the Institute of High Performance Computing, compared to a single-layer structure.
Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), 138632, Singapore Then, a planar three-layer superstrate consisting of a finite number
(e-mail: lid@ihpc.a-star.edu.sg; eplee@ihpc.a-star.edu.sg).
Z. Szabó is with the Department of Broadband Infocommunications and of zero-index metamaterial unit cells is considered. The superstrate is
Electromagnetic Theory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, placed over a printed patch antenna to enhance the broadside gain. As
H-1111, Budapest, Hungary (e-mail: szabo@evtsz.bme.hu). the effective material parameters are extracted with the assumption that
X. Qing and Z. N. Chen are with the Institute of Infocomm Research, Agency the plane wave incidence is perpendicular on the zero-index metama-
of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), 138632, Singapore (e-mail: terial, the focusing ability of the superstrate is compromised due to the
qingxm@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; eleczn@nus.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are avail- change of material properties under oblique incidences. Therefore, a
able online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. second optimization is performed for each unit cell of the superstrate,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2213231 to further enhance the broadside gain of the antenna. In this design step
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012 6019

the complete device consisting of the patch antenna and superstrate is


considered in the optimization procedure. Three antennas are designed
and simulated within the working frequency range of the metamaterial
superstrates. Among them, one is selected and fabricated and its per-
formance validated through measurements.
The rest of the communication is organized as follows: Section II
introduces the geometry of the proposed zero-index metamaterial unit
cell, describes the details of the first optimization procedure with the
main steps of the effective material parameter extraction algorithm and
presents the extracted material parameters from simulated and mea-
sured scattering parameters. Section III presents the high-gain meta-
material superstrate antenna and describes the details of the optimiza- Fig. 2. The simulation setup in CST STUDIO SUITE for the transmission anal-
tion procedure and validates the design with measurements. Section IV ysis of the metamaterial unit cell.
gives a brief conclusion of this work.
TABLE I
GEOMETRIC PARAMETERS OF THE UNIT CELL OF THE METAMATERIAL
II. METAMATERIAL UNIT CELL CHARACTERIZATION USING SUPERSTRATE
EFFECTIVE MEDIUM THEORY
A metamaterial unit cell of Fig. 1(b) is used as the building block
of the antenna superstrate. This kind of unit cell is first use as an ELC
resonator in constructing metamaterials with negative permittivity [10],
[11]. The unit cell consists of a set of metallic lines printed on a Rogers
4003 substrate with thickness of 0.8 mm and relative permittivity "r =
3:55.
A set of design parameters p, a, b, c, and w shown in Fig. 1(b) de-
fine the geometry of the metallic strips. These parameters of the unit
cell allow us to design a metamaterial with a very small loss in the
frequency region where the effective electric permittivity and the re-
fractive index are zero. The scattering parameters are calculated with
a commercial field solver, the CST Microwave Studio, and the effec-
tive material parameters are extracted with the procedure presented in
[12]. The algorithm of [12] is converted into a CST macro, therefore
the full design procedure can be performed in the CST framework and
the built-in optimization can be conveniently utilized.
The constitutive effective wave impedance Zeff and the effective
refractive index Neff for the given metamaterial unit cell are extracted
from the Fresnel relations of the normal incidence

Zeff = 6 (1 + S11 )2 0 S212


(1 0 S11 )2 0 S212 (1) Fig. 3. The measurement setup for obtaining the (a)
metamaterial unit cell.
S and (b) S of the

Neff =
1 Im ln S21
+ 2m
k0 deff 1 0 S11 R01 upper limit of the integral is usually chosen to be a reasonably large
value in practice [12].
0iRe ln 1 0 SS2111 R01 ; Fig. 2 shows the modeling of the structure in CST Microwave Studio.
Due to periodicity, one unit cell with perfect electric conducting and
m = 0; 1; 2 . . . (2) perfect magnetic conducting boundary conditions in the x- and the
y -directions is sufficient to calculate the scattering parameters below
where deff is the thickness of the virtual homogeneous slab, which the frequencies where diffraction occurs. The structure is terminated in
replaces the real geometry, k0 is the free space wave impedance, and perfectly matched absorbers in the z -direction. The scattering param-
R01 = (Zeff 0 1)=(Zeff + 1). eters are calculated over the frequency range of 0–20 GHz, therefore
It shall be noted here that the real part of the complex refractive the refractive index neff can be accurately calculated in the 10 GHz
index in (2) has multiple solutions. However, due to the uniqueness of frequency region with the extraction algorithm. The phase of the S -pa-
the material parameters, just one solution can have physical meaning. rameters is de-embedded to the surface of the structure in the negative
In [12], the uniqueness of the refractive index is enforced with the z -direction, and to 1.6 mm above the surface in the positive z -direc-
Kramers-Kronig [13] relations. The real part of the effective refractive tion. This is to account for a reasonable separation between multiple
index neff can be extracted from the corresponding imaginary part layers of the structure when they are used as superstrates in antenna
eff without ambiguity applications.
The values of geometry parameters obtained from the optimization

( ) = 1 + 2 P ( )
1
!eff ! procedure for the zero-index metamaterial unit cell are summarized in
neff !0 d!
0 0
! 2 ! 02
(3) Table I.
The simulation results of the S -parameters are further validated by
where P is the principal value of the improper integral. Since it is not measurements. Fig. 3 shows the measurement setup for S11 and S21
possible to know the value of eff over the complete spectrum, the of the metamaterial superstrate under normal incidence. The fabricated
6020 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012

Fig. 4. The simulated and measured magnitude of S parameters of the meta- Fig. 6. The extracted relative permittivity and permeability of the metamaterial
material unit cell with respect to the frequency. superstrate with respect to the frequency using the effective medium theory.

Fig. 7. The extracted effective refractive index of the metamaterial superstrate,


with one, two, and three layer stacking, with respect to the frequency using the
Fig. 5. The simulated and measured phase of S parameters of the metamaterial effective medium theory.
unit cell with respect to the frequency.
around 10 GHz the effective permittivity of the structure is very close to
metamaterial consists of an array of 30 by 30 unit cells on a single layer zero. Fig. 7 shows the extracted effective refractive index for one, two,
of substrate. To measure the scattering parameters, the metamaterial is and three stacked layers of the metamaterial unit cell. At the frequency
surrounded by artificial absorbers. Two high directivity horn antennas of 10 GHz, the effective refractive index of the three-layer metamaterial
are used as the transmitter and the receiver. The system is calibrated is found to be 0:07 + 0:11i, which is very close to 0.
using a void hole, an absorber, and a PEC reflector embedded in the To compare the performance of the metamaterial with different
same absorber. The calibrated S -parameters are given by stacked layers, the threshold jnj < 1 is used as a means to evaluate the
working bandwidth of the zero-index metamaterial. This is considering
ABS
= SSPEC S11 0 the fact that a slab with a very small index can still have the ability to
CAL
S11 11 j j 0

j
ABS
S11 j 0 j
focus the beam towards the broadside direction. It is observed in the
11 j
figure that the metamaterial unit cell with one, two, and three layers
CAL
arg(S11 ) = arg(S11 ) arg(S11PEC ) ;
0
0 0 (4) all have a considerably wide bandwidth. Particularly, the three-layer
PEC
CAL = S21 S21 0
j j 0 stacking structure has the widest operating frequency range from 9.45
S21 V OID PEC
S21 j S21 j 0 j j GHz to 10.7 GHz, which yields a bandwidth of 12.5%.
CAL
arg(S21 ) = arg(S21 ) arg(S21V OID );
0
0 (5)
III. HIGH GAIN ANTENNA DESIGN AND MEASUREMENT USING
where S11 and S21 are the original measured S -parameters, and the
0 0 ZERO-INDEX SUPERSTRATE
superscripts V OID , P EC , and ABS denote for S -parameters used The metamaterial structure presented in the last section is employed
for calibration with a void hole, a PEC reflector and an absorber, re- as a superstrate for a patch antenna operating at 10 GHz to enhance
spectively. Moreover, the measured time-domain field is windowed to the antenna gain of the broadside. Fig. 8(a) shows the side view of the
alleviate the error caused by the multi-path effect due to the measure- constructed antenna along with the metamaterial superstrate. The su-
ment setup. perstrate consists of three layers, each layer having 7 by 7 unit cells
Figs. 4 and 5 show the simulated and measured scattering parameters in both x- and y -directions as shown in Fig. 1(b). To each of these di-
S11 and S21 . The magnitude of the simulated S -parameters matches rections, additional rim space on the superstrates with 10 mm width is
very well with the measurement. The discrepancy observed between reserved for supporting purpose. Different superstrate layers are sepa-
the simulated and measured phase is mainly induced by the alignment rated with air gaps of h2 = 1:6 mm. FR4 materials with "r = 4:2 are
of the measurement setup. added between layers and along the extra rim space to offer a solid sup-
Fig. 6 presents the calculated effective relative electric permittivity port. The superstrate is fixed above the antenna using four plastic bolts
and relative magnetic permeability of the metamaterial extracted from at the corners. The spacing from the radiation source to the bottom in-
the simulated S parameters. It is shown that around a fairly wide range terface of the superstrate is h1 = 23 mm. At this distance the near-field
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012 6021

TABLE II
DESIGN PARAMETERS OF THE UNIT CELLS OF THE SUBSTRATE AFTER
OPTIMIZATION

Fig. 8. (a) The side view of the patch antenna along with the metamaterial
superstrate; (b) the top view of the patch antenna. Fig. 9. The fabricated patch antenna with optimized zero-index metamaterial
superstrates.

coupling between the superstrate and the patch antenna is not signif-
icant. Therefore, the characteristics of the original patch antenna, i.e.,
resonant frequency and bandwidth, are practically unaffected by the
presence of the superstrate.
The symmetric patch antenna used as a radiation source is printed
onto a 62 mm 2 62 mm Rogers 4003 substrate with thickness of 0.8
mm and relative permittivity "r = 3:55, which is identical to that of
the superstrate layers. The center of the patch is aligned with the center
of the substrate. The patch and the superstrate are positioned in such a
way that the longest strip of the metamaterial unit cell and the electric
field created by the patch are aligned in the same direction.
To validate the beam-focusing ability of the metamaterial superstrate
within the working frequency range, three different patch antennas are
simulated, each resonating at 9.6 GHz, 10 GHz, and 10.6 GHz, re- Fig. 10. The simulated S with respect to frequency at the input of three meta-
spectively. All the patches are fed by a microstrip line with 1.6 mm material antennas, working at 9.6 GHz, 10 GHz, and 10.6 GHz, respectively, and
width, corresponding to an input impedance of 50
. The feed and the measured S of the fabricated metamaterial antenna working at 10.6 GHz.
the patch are connected with a quarter-wavelength line with a length
d1 = 4:2 mm and a width of 0.2 mm for impedance matching. The 10 the parameter c in a unit cell which is a and b cells away from the cen-
dB return-loss bandwidth is 3% and the gain at the resonance is 5 dBi tral one in the x- and the y -directions (e.g., c12 denotes for the unit cells
for all three antennas. 1 cell away from the center in the x-direction and 2 cells away from the
To implement the aforementioned metamaterial superstrate for center in the y -direction), and co denotes for the parameter c in the ar-
broadside antenna gain enhancement, it is important to notice that the rays of cells along the rim of the superstrate. It can be observed that the
effective material parameters extracted in Figs. 6 and 7 are subject to parameters in cells at the corner of the rim deviates most significantly
normal incident waves. For most of the unit cells on the superstrate from the initial values, due to the existence of strong oblique waves.
except the central ones, an oblique wave from the radiation source is To validate the result of the simulations, the proposed antenna
impinged onto the cell. In this case, the effective material parameter resonating at 10.6 GHz and the superstrate were fabricated according
may differ from what is extracted using the assumption of normal to the optimized design parameters in Table II and assembled. Fig. 9
incidence. To account for this problem, a second optimization is shows the fabricated antenna structure, whose S11 as well as the
performed with respect to each unit cell of the superstrate to maximize realized gain and radiation patterns are measured.
the broadside gain of the antenna. Fig. 10 shows the simulated jS11 j for three optimized metamaterial
The design parameter space of the optimization is selected by a sensi- antennas working at 9.6 GHz, 10 GHz, and 10.6 GHz, as well as the
tivity analysis. It is determined that for each unit cell, the most sensitive measured S11 of the fabricated metamaterial antenna working at 10.6
geometric parameter on the effective refractive index is the parameter GHz. It is observed that the simulated resonance for the 10.6 GHz an-
c in Table I. Therefore, the optimized parameter space includes c in tenna matches the measurement very well. In Fig. 11, it is shown that
each unit cell of the superstrate. The values of the geometry parame- for antennas with all three resonances, the broadside gain of the meta-
ters presented in Table I are used for each unit cell as the initial values material antenna is significantly increased at their respective resonance.
of the optimization procedure and the broadside gain of the antenna at For the antenna working at 10.6 GHz, the simulation matches the mea-
10 GHz is set as the target function to be maximized. The built-in op- surement very well.
timizer of CST is used for the optimization process. The optimized metamaterial antenna works at 10 GHz as a simulated
Table II shows the design parameters of the unit cell after optimiza- broadside gain of 12.8 dBi, 7.8 dBi higher from the original patch an-
tion for the 10.6 GHz antenna, as an example. The subscript cab denotes tenna. For the metamaterial antenna working at 10.6 GHz, the gain is
6022 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012

where Aeff is the effective aperture size of the superstrate, which is 42


mm 2 42 mm excluding the supporting rim area, and ef is the radia-
tion efficiency. Therefore, the broadside gain attained by the two meta-
material antennas working at 10 GHz and 10.6 GHz from simulation
and measurement is 80% and 70% of the maximum gain, respectively,
which means the radiation energy is mostly directed to the broadside.
Fig. 12 shows the radiation pattern of the optimized metamaterial an-
tenna from both simulation and measurement at their working frequen-
cies. The radiation beam, especially within H-planes, are well focused,
with sufficiently low side lobes and back lobes. The 3 dB beamwidth
within the E- and the H-planes are 22 and 24 for the simulated pat-
terns, and 21 and 26 for the measured patterns, respectively.

Fig. 11. The realized broadside gain with respect to frequency of three meta- IV. CONCLUSIONS
material antennas, working at 9.6 GHz, 10 GHz, and 10.6 GHz, compared to
their respective reference patch antennas, and the measured gain of the meta- We have proposed a low refractive index metamaterial inspired struc-
material antenna working at 10.6 GHz. ture as a superstrate for antenna gain enhancement. Both simulations
and measurements have shown that the effective refractive index of the
metamaterial under normal incidence is close to zero over a frequency
range from 9.45 GHz to 10.7 GHz. To validate the superstrate, High-di-
rectivity antennas consisting of a patch antenna and three layers of
the metamaterial superstrate working within this frequency range have
been simulated and fabricated. The superstrate has been optimized to
take into consideration the oblique incidence from the radiation source.
The simulated and measured results have shown significant gain en-
hancement within the working frequency range of the superstrate. Es-
pecially, the metamaterial antenna working at 10 GHz has a 7.8 dBi
and gain enhancement at broadside compared to the original patch an-
tenna, which is 80% of the radiation of a perfect radiating surface with
the same area.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are thankful to Dr. A. Khurrum Rashid for his contribu-
tion in measurements.

REFERENCES
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11.9 dBi, and the corresponding measured broadside gain for this an- Phys. Rev. B, vol. 75, no. Art. ID 075119, Feb. 2007.
tenna at the resonance is achieved as high as 11.43 dB. It is important to [7] M. Silveirinha and N. Engheta, “Theory of supercoupling, squeezing
note here that direct comparison between the gain of the metamaterial wave energy, and field confinement in narrow channels and tight bends
using " near-zero metamaterials,” Phys. Rev. B, vol. 76, no. Art. ID
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better characterize the performance of the designed antenna, the max- at optical frequencies,” IEEE Trans. Nanotech., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 55–61,
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Gmax = 4
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Germany: Springer-Verlag, 2005.

Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cavity-Backed


Wide Slot Antenna for 60-GHz Bands
Ke Gong, Zhi Ning Chen, Xianming Qing, Peng Chen, and
Wei Hong

Abstract—A wide slot antenna backed by a substrate integrated wave-


guide (SIW) cavity is presented and investigated for the enhancement of
Fig. 1. The SIW cavity-backed wide slot antenna with slot WLR = 0 4.
:

operating bandwidth at 60-GHz band. The 10-dB return loss impedance


bandwidth of the antenna increases from 3% to 11.6% with consistent ra-
diation performance as the width to length ratio (WLR) of the rectangular narrows the impedance bandwidth of the antennas to around 3% or
slot cutting from the SIW increases from 0.12 to 0.71. Its dual-resonance
operation mechanism is verified by a parametric study. Three 2 4 an- less [5]–[8].
tenna arrays with different slot WLRs are designed and fabricated with a In this communication, a planar wide slot antenna backed by an SIW
printed circuit board (PCB) process at the 60-GHz bands. The measured cavity is proposed for bandwidth enhancement at 60-GHz bands. The
results show that the antenna array with slot WLR of 0.71 achieves the gain impedance bandwidth, radiation patterns and gain of the antenna are
of 10–12 dBi and the cross-polarization levels of better than 25 dB in both
analyzed against the WLR of the slot. In the proposed antenna, the
- and -planes over the enhanced operating bandwidth of about 11.6%.
backed cavity is not only a reflector for the radiating slot, but also a
Index Terms—Cavity-backed antenna, dual-resonance, slot antenna, radiation element for the whole antenna. To verify the dual-resonance
substrate integrated waveguide (SIW), 60-GHz band.
operating mechanism of the antenna, a parametric study is carried out
using CST. The cavity-backed slot antennas show compact size, which
are suitable for array application. With the optimized elements, three
2 2 4 antenna arrays with different WLRs are prototyped using PCB
I. INTRODUCTION
Waveguide slot array antennas and cavity-backed slot antennas technology at 60 GHz bands.
are widely used in radar and communication systems. The slot with
a large width-to-length ratio has been successfully employed to II. SIW CAVITY-BACKED WIDE SLOT ANTENNA
enhance the operating bandwidth of the antennas [1]–[4]. On the other
Fig. 1 depicts the geometry of the proposed SIW cavity-backed wide
hand, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) slot array antennas and
slot antenna. A transverse wide slot with the WLR of 0.4 ( s s =W =L
cavity-backed slot antennas have been extremely investigated in recent
:
0 4) is etched onto the broad-wall of an SIW. The SIW is short-cir-
years. However, the reduced waveguide height of the SIW greatly
d
cuited at a distance 0 from the center of the slot. An inductive window
d
is inserted into the SIW at a distance 1 from the short-circuited end
Manuscript received March 31, 2012; revised June 06, 2012; accepted d d
of SIW, where 1 is about twice of 0 . Thus, an SIW cavity-backed
July 30, 2012. Date of publication August 14, 2012; date of current version W d
wide slot antenna is formed with size of siw1 and 1 , and it is fed
November 29, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National 973
project of China 2010CB327400, the National Nature Science Foundation of W D P
by the SIW with the width of siw . 1 and are the diameter of the
China (NSFC) under Grant 60921063, Research Fund for the Doctoral Program via-hole and the spacing between adjacent via-holes, respectively. The
of Higher Education of China under Grant 20100092120013 and in part by slotted-cavity and the feeding SIW are formed with the conditions of
the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore,
Terahertz Science & Technology Inter-RI Program under Grant #0821410040
D =P
1 :
0 5 and 1 0D = :
0 1 [9].
In the proposed antenna, the slot operates at its dominant mode with
by the Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and
Research (A*STAR), Singapore. the overall length of approximate a half operating wavelength, and
K. Gong, P. Chen and W. Hong are with the State Key Laboratory of the backed slotted-cavity resonates at its dominant mode frequency.
Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: The antenna is fabricated onto a piece of a 0.635-mm thick RO3006
kegong@emfield.org; pengchen@emfield.org; weihong@seu.edu.cn). " :
substrate with a dielectric constant of r = 6 15 and loss tangent of
Z. N. Chen is with Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Na-
tional University of Singapore, Singapore 117583 and also with the Institute for  :
tan = 0 0025, and simulated and optimized using CST.
Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), The proposed cavity-backed slot antenna exhibits a dual-resonant
138632, Singapore (e-mail: eleczn@nus.edu.sg; chenzn@i2r.a-star.edu.sg). characteristic, and its operating bandwidth can be enhanced by in-
X. Qing is with the Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Sci- creasing the slot WLR. Fig. 2 shows the simulated return losses of the
ence, Technology and Research (A*STAR), 138632, Singapore (e-mail: antennas with the WLRs of 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.71, respectively. During
qingxm@i2r.a-star.edu.sg).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are avail- the WLR varies from 0.2 to 0.71, the good impedance matching with
two resonances is maintained by tuning the parameters including
L d W d W
able online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2213060 s, 1, siw1 , 0 and w , and nearly four times enhancement in

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