Dispersion-Engineered Transmission Line Loaded Slot Antenna for UWB Applications

A transmission line (TL) loaded, compact, ultrawideband (UWB) square slot antenna is proposed in this letter. The square slot is a microstrip line fed and loaded with an array of periodically perturbed TLs to achieve a UWB response from 2.1 to 11.5 GHz. The slot is designed to resonate at 2.6 GHz. The TLs are dispersion engineered to resonate at several frequencies so as to provide a wideband response. Loading of the engineered TLs on the square slot produced multiple resonances without affecting the fundamental mode of the slot antenna. The proposed antenna design is analyzed using dispersion relations and equivalent circuits. The proposed antenna is fabricated on an RT/Duroid 5880 substrate with a size of 50 × 50 × 1.52 mm
³
. The antenna performance metrics, such as impedance bandwidth, gain, and efficiency, are experimentally verified. Good agreement is obtained between simulated and measured results.