Design of Compact Stepped Open Slot Antenna for UWB Applications

Abstract

In this paper, a design method for a compact stepped open slot antenna for an operation in the UWB band is studied. The proposed antenna is miniaturized by inserting L-shaped slots on the ground plane of the stepped open slot antenna through the creation of a resonance in the low frequency, and a strip director is appended to the antenna in order to increase the gain in the middle and high frequency regions. The effects of varying the length of the L-shaped slots, the distance between the director and the slot antenna, and the director length on input reflection coefficient and realized gain characteristics of the proposed antenna are analyzed. The optimized antenna with the size of 30 mm × 30 mm is fabricated on an FR4 substrate, and the experiment results show that the antenna has a frequency band of 3.02 — 11.04 GHz for a VSWR < 2, which assures the operation in the UWB band.