1670 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO.
6, JUNE 2006
Study of Printed Elliptical/Circular Slot Antennas for
Ultrawideband Applications
Pengcheng Li, Jianxin Liang, Student Member, IEEE, and Xiaodong Chen, Member, IEEE
Abstract—Two novel designs of planar elliptical slot antennas are
presented. Printed on a dielectric substrate and fed by either mi-
crostrip line or coplanar waveguide with U-shaped tuning stub, the
elliptical/circular slots have been demonstrated to exhibit an ultra-
wideband characteristic. The performances and characteristics of
the proposed antennas are investigated both numerically and ex-
perimentally. Based on these analyses, an empirical formula is in-
troduced to approximately determine the lower edge of the 10
dB operating bandwidth. It is also shown that these antennas are
nearly omnidirectional over a majority fraction of the bandwidth.
Index Terms—Coplanar waveguide (CPW), microstrip line,
printed antenna, slot antenna, ultrawideband (UWB).
I. INTRODUCTION
UE to the attractive merits, such as low profile, light-
D weight, ease of fabrication and wide frequency bandwidth,
printed slot antennas are currently under consideration for use
in ultrawideband (UWB) systems. This type of antenna has
been realized by using either microstrip line [1]–[4] or coplanar
waveguide (CPW) feeding structure [5]–[7].
In [1], a round corner rectangular slot antenna which is etched
on a substrate with dimension of 68 mm 50 mm can achieve
a 10 dB bandwidth of 6.17 GHz. In [2], a fork-like tuning
stub is used to enhance the bandwidth of microstrip line fed
wide-slot antenna. A bandwidth of 1.1 GHz (1.821–2.912 GHz)
has been achieved with gain variation less than 1.5 dBi (3.5–5
dBi) over the entire operational band. In [6], a CPW fed square
slot antenna with a widened tuning stub can yield a bandwidth
of 60%. The antenna has a dimension of 72 mm 72 mm and its
gain ranges from 3.75 to 4.88 dBi within the operational band.
In [7], a CPW fed rectangular slot antenna with a substrate of
100 mm 100 mm can provide a bandwidth of 110% with gain
varying from 1.9 to 5.1 dBi.
It is shown that the achieved bandwidths of these antennas
can not cover the whole FCC defined UWB frequency band
(3.1–10.6 GHz). Besides, the size of the antenna is not very
small.
In this paper, two novel designs of printed elliptical/circular
slot antennas are proposed for UWB applications. One is fed
by microstrip line, and the other by CPW. In both designs, a
U-shaped tuning stub is introduced to enhance the coupling
Manuscript received March 30, 2005; revised November 8, 2005. The work
of P. Li was supported by the China Scholarship Council.
The authors are with Department of Electronic Engineering, Queen Mary,
University of London, London E1 4NS, U.K. (e-mail: jianxin.liang@elec.
qmul.ac.uk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2006.875499
0018-926X/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
between the slot and the feed line so as to broaden the op-
erating bandwidth of the antenna. Furthermore, an additional
bandwidth enhancement can be achieved by tapering the feeding
line. Good agreement is obtained between the simulation and
experiment. Both of them have shown that the proposed an-
tennas can exhibit UWB characteristic with nearly omnidirec-
tional radiation patterns over the entire bandwidth. Furthermore,
these antennas feature a small size compared with those pub-
lished in [1]–[7]. All of the simulations are performed by using
CST Microwave Studio package which utilizes the Finite Inte-
gration Technique for electromagnetic computation [8].
The rest of the paper is structured as the following. Section II
describes antenna geometries. The antenna performances are
evaluated in Section III. Section IV considers the most impor-
tant design parameters. A conclusion is given in Section V.
II. ANTENNA GEOMETRY
The proposed printed elliptical/circular slot antennas with
two different feeding structures are illustrated in Fig. 1(a) and
(b), respectively. For the microstrip line fed elliptical/circular
slot antenna, the slot and the feeding line are printed on dif-
ferent sides of the dielectric substrate; for the CPW fed one,
they are printed on the same side of the substrate.
In both designs, the elliptical/circular radiating slot has a long
axis radius and a short axis radius (for circular slot, )
and is etched on a rectangular FR4 substrate with a thickness
and a relative dielectric constant . The
feed line is tapered with a slant angle for a
length to connect with the U-shaped tuning stub which is
all positioned within the elliptical/circular slot and symmetrical
with respect to the short axis of the elliptical/circular slot. The
U-shaped tuning stub consists of three sections: the semi-circle
ring section with an outer radius and an inner radius , and
two identical branch sections with equal heights and equal
widths . represents the distance between the bottom of the
tuning stub and the lower edge of the elliptical/circular slot.
III. PERFORMANCES OF ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR
SLOT ANTENNAS
Four printed elliptical/circular slot antennas with the optimal
designs were fabricated and tested in the Antennas Laboratory at
Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). Their respective
dimensions are given in Table I. It is noticed that all of these
four antennas feature a small size and even the largest one, i.e.
microstrip line fed circular slot, is still 37% less than the antenna
presented in [1].
LI et al.: STUDY OF PRINTED ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR SLOT ANTENNAS FOR UWB APPLICATIONS
Fig. 1. Geometry of printed elliptical/circular slot antennas. (a) Elliptical/cir-
cular slot antennas fed by microstrip line and (b) elliptical/circular slot antenna
fed by CPW.
A. Return Loss
The return losses of the four antennas were measured by using
an HP8720ES vector network analyzer. The measured and sim-
ulated return loss curves are plotted in Fig. 2. Their respective
10 dB bandwidths are tabulated in Table II.
As shown in Fig. 2 and Table II, good agreement has been
achieved between the measurement and experiment for each of
1671
TABLE I
THE OPTIMAL DIMENSIONS OF THE PRINTED ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR
SLOT ANTENNAS
TABLE II
MEASURED AND SIMULATED BANDWIDTHS OF PRINTED ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR
SLOT ANTENNAS
the antennas. It is demonstrated that all of the four antennas can
achieve much wider bandwidth compared with those in [1]–[7]
and hence meet the bandwidth requirement for UWB antenna.
B. Radiation Patterns
The radiation patterns of the antennas were also measured in-
side an anechoic chamber. As shown in Figs. 3 and 4, the mea-
sured patterns agree well with the simulated ones for both el-
liptical slot antennas. It is noticed that the printed elliptical/cir-
cular slot antennas with different feeding structures can provide
similar radiation patterns. The -plane pattern is monopole-
like, and the number of lobes rises with the increase of fre-
quency which means the antenna gets more directional. The
slight asymmetry on the -plane pattern is due to the imper-
fection of fabrication of the antennas. The -plane pattern is
nearly omnidirectional at lower frequency, but becomes more
asymmetrical to -axis at higher frequency. This is due to the
tuning stub acting as a radiator itself and its effect becoming
more prominent at high frequency.
C. Antenna Gain
The measured gains of the four antennas are presented in
Fig. 5. It is seen that the measured gains fluctuate within the
range from 2 to 7 dBi and reach the maximum values at 10 GHz
for all of the four slot antennas. Generally speaking, the mea-
sured gains are similar to those presented in [1]–[7] over most
parts of the bandwidth. However, due to the wider operational
bandwidth compared with those in [1]–[7], the gains have more
variations, as shown in Fig. 5.
1672
Fig. 2. Measured and simulated return loss curves of printed elliptical/circular
slot antennas. (a) Microstrip line fed elliptical slot antenna, (b) microstrip line
fed circular slot antenna, (c) CPW fed elliptical slot antenna, and (d) CPW fed
circular slot antenna.
D. Current Distributions
The simulated current distributions of CPW fed elliptical slot
antenna at four frequencies are presented in Fig. 6, as a typical
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 6, JUNE 2006
Fig. 3. Simulated (dotted line) and measured (solid line) radiation patterns of
microstrip line fed elliptical slot antenna. (a) E -plane at 3.1 GHz, (b) H -plane
at 3.1 GHz, (c) E -plane at 10 GHz, and (d) H -plane at 10 GHz.
Fig. 4. Simulated (dotted line) and measured (solid line) radiation patterns of
CPW fed elliptical slot antenna. (a) E -plane at 3.1 GHz, (b) H -plane at 3.1
GHz, (c) E -plane at 10.6 GHz, and (d) H -plane at 10.6 GHz.
example. On the ground plane, the current is mainly distributed
along the edge of the slot for all of the four different frequencies.
The current patterns indicate the existence of different resonant
harmonics, i.e. the first harmonic at 3.3 GHz in Fig. 6(a), the
second around 5 GHz in Fig. 6(b), the third around 7.5 GHz in
Fig. 6(c) and the fourth harmonic around 10 GHz in Fig. 6(d).
Normally, the bandwidth of an antenna comes from one reso-
nant mode. However, Fig. 6 indicates that the elliptical/circular
LI et al.: STUDY OF PRINTED ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR SLOT ANTENNAS FOR UWB APPLICATIONS 1673

Fig. 5. Measured gains of the four antennas.

slot is capable of supporting four resonant modes, and the over-

lapping of all of these four resonant modes leads to the UWB
characteristic [9], as shown in Fig. 7.

IV. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

Studies in the previous sections have indicated that the ultra
wide bandwidth of the slot antenna results from the overlapping
of the multiple resonances introduced by the combination of the
elliptical slot and the feeding line with U-shaped tuning stub.
Thus, the slot dimension, the distance and the slant angle are
the most important design parameters which affect the antenna
performance and need to be further investigated.

A. Dimension of Elliptical Slot

It is noticed that the dimension of the slot antenna is directly
related to the lower edge of the impedance bandwidth. In the
case of elliptical disc monopoles [10], an empirical formula for
estimating the lower edge frequency of the 10 dB bandwidth
is derived based on the equivalence of a planar configuration
to a cylindrical wire, as shown

(1) Fig. 6. Simulated current distributions of CPW fed elliptical slot antenna. (a)
3.3 GHz, (b) 5 GHz, (c) 7.5 GHz, and (d) 10 GHz.

where in GHz, and in centimeters. is the disc height,

is equivalent radius of the cylinder given by .
In this paper, the elliptical slot can be regarded as an equiva-
lent magnetic surface. Equation (1) is modified empirically as

(2)

where , in cm, and in GHz; , . is the Fig. 7. Overlapping of the multiple resonant modes.
element factor which equals to 0.32 for elliptical slot and 0.35
for circular slot, respectively.
The comparison between the calculated and the measured B. Distance
one for different printed slot antennas are tabulated in Table III.
It is shown that the measured matches the calculated one quite The simulated return loss curves of CPW fed elliptical slot
well. antenna for various ( ) with
1674 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 54, NO. 6, JUNE 2006
TABLE III
THE CALCULATED AND MEASURED LOWER EDGE OF 010 dB BANDWIDTH
Fig. 8. Simulated return loss curves of CPW fed elliptical slot antenna for dif-
ferent S with A = 14:5 mm, B = 10 mm and  = 15 degrees.
Fig. 9. Simulated return loss curves of CPW fed elliptical slot antenna for dif-
ferent  with A = 14:5 mm, B = 10 mm and S = 0:4 mm.
, and are illus-
trated in Fig. 8. It is seen that the curves for different have
similar shape and variation trend, but the optimal distance is
because it can provide the widest 10 dB band-
width.
C. Slant Angle
In Fig. 9, the return loss curves of CPW fed elliptical slot
antenna for different slant angles with ,
and are plotted. It is observed that the
lower edge of the 10 dB bandwidth is independent of , but
the upper edge is very sensitive to the variation of . The optimal
slant angle is found to be at , with a bandwidth
of 8.4 GHz (from 3.0 to 11.4 GHz).
V. CONCLUSION
It has been shown that ultrawideband characteristic was
achieved for printed elliptical/circular slot antenna using ta-
pered microstrip or CPW feeding line with U-shaped tuning
stub. The slot dimension, the distance and the slant angle
are the most important design parameters that determine the
antenna performance. Experimental results have also confirmed
UWB characteristics of the proposed antennas as well as nearly
omnidirectional radiation properties over a majority fraction
of the bandwidth. These features and their small sizes make
them attractive for future UWB applications. The time domain
characteristics of these printed elliptical/circular slot antennas
will be investigated in the future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge Computer Simula-
tion Technology (CST), Germany, for the complimentary li-
cense of the Microwave Studio package. The authors would like
to thank Mr. J. Dupuy of the Department of Electronic Engi-
neering, QMUL for his help in the fabrication and measurement
of the antenna.
REFERENCES
[1] H. L. Lee, H. J. Lee, J. G. Yook, and H. K. Park, “Broadband planar
antenna having round corner rectangular wide slot,” in Proc. IEEE An-
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pp. 460–463.
[2] J.-Y. Sze and K.-L. Wong, “Bandwidth enhancement of a microstrip-
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vol. 49, no. 7, pp. 1020–1024, Jul. 2001.
[3] Y. W. Jang, “Broadband cross-shaped microstrip-fed slot antenna,”
Electronics Letters, vol. 36, no. 25, pp. 2056–2057, Dec. 7, 2000.
[4] M. K. Kim, K. Kim, Y. H. Suh, and I. Park, “A T-shaped microstrip-
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[5] J.-Y. Chiou, J.-Y. Sze, and K.-L. Wong, “A broad-band CPW-fed strip-
loaded square slot antenna,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 51,
no. 4, pp. 719–721, Apr. 2003.
[6] H.-D. Chen, “Broadband CPW-fed square slot antennas with a
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[7] R. Chair, A. A. Kishk, and K. F. Lee, “Ultrawide-band coplanar wave-
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[8] “CST-Microwave Studio, User’s Manual,” 2003.
[9] J. Liang, L. Guo, C. C. Chiau, X. Chen, and C. G. Parini, “Study of
CPW-fed circular disc monopole antenna,” Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng. Mi-
crowaves, Antennas and Propagation, 2005, Accepted for publication.
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LI et al.: STUDY OF PRINTED ELLIPTICAL/CIRCULAR SLOT ANTENNAS FOR UWB APPLICATIONS
Pengcheng Li received the B.Sc. degree from
Xiangtan University, China, in 1985, and the M.Sc.
degree from Beijing Research Institute of Telemetry
Technology, Beijing, China, in 1991. He is working
toward the Ph.D. degree at the Electronic Engi-
neering College ,Beijing University of Aeronautics
and Astronautics, Beijing.
He is currently working at Beijing Research Insti-
tute of Telemetry Technology, China. His current re-
search interests focus on UWB antenna design and
analysis and microwave circuit.
Mr. Li was the recipient of a scholarship from the Chinese Scholarship Fund
to pursue research as an Academic Visitor in the Communications Research
Group, Department of Electronic Engineering, Queen Mary, University of
London, U.K., from September 2004 to March 2006.
Jianxin Liang (S’04) received the B.Sc. and the
M.Sc. degrees from Nankai University, China,
in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Currently, he is
working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Communi-
cations Research Group, Department of Electronic
Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London,
U.K.
His current research interests focus on UWB an-
tenna design and analysis.
1675
Xiaodong Chen (M’96) received the B.Sc. degree
from the University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China,
in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree from the University
of Electronic Science and Technology of China,
Chengdu, in 1988.
In September 1988, he joined the Department of
Electronic Engineering at King’s College, University
of London, as a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow. In
September 1990, he was employed by the King’s
College London as a Research Associate. In March
1996, he was appointed to an EEV Lectureship at
King’s College London. In September 1999, he joined the Department of
Electronic Engineering at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University
of London as a College Lecturer. In October 2003, he was promoted to a
Readership at the same institution. His research interests are in microwave
devices and antennas, bio-electromagnetic and nonlinear dynamics and chaos.
He has authored and coauthored over 160 publications (book chapters, journal
papers and refereed conference presentations).
Dr. Chen has been involved in the organization of many international con-
ferences: he has served as Chairman of Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE)
International Workshop on Ultra Wide Band Technologies and Systems (2004),
co-chairman of the Institute of Physics (IoP)/IEE International Workshop on
RF Interaction with Humans (2003), Executive Chairman of The International
Conference on Telecommunications (ICT), 2004. He is currently a member of
the U.K. EPSRC Review College and Technical Panel of the Institution of Elec-
trical Engineers (IEE) Antennas and Propagation Professional Network.