Analysis and Design of a Novel Circularly Polarized Antipodal Linearly Tapered Slot Antenna

This paper presents and characterizes a novel antipodal linearly tapered slot antenna for generating the circularly polarized (CP) field. By introducing two symmetrical slots on the top and bottom layers of a rectangular WR-15 waveguide, we could obtain circular polarization with an axial ratio bandwidth of 34.1%. The waveguide was used to feed the proposed antenna with very wideband impedance matching. The antenna can achieve impedance bandwidth of 40% for S(1,1) <;-15 dB from 50 to 75 GHz. The simulation and measurement results show that the antenna can produce very good radiation patterns, with stable gain of 9.8 dBi ± 1.24 dBi, low back radiation, and narrow beamwidth over the operating frequency range. The working principle of this CP antenna is explained, using theoretical equations and explicit current distributions. The proposed antenna is easy to manufacture and is a compact candidate for high performance CP millimeter-wave antenna.