End-Fire Vivaldi Antenna Array With Wide Fan-Beam for 5G Mobile Handsets

In this paper, we present a portable end-fire antenna array design for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile handsets that exploits a Vivaldi antenna and shows a wide fan-beam on the elevation plane. We make the proposed antenna array more efficient by printing on a 10-layer printed circuit board (PCB) lamination in a vertical direction of the ground plane edge. Using the proposed Vivaldi antenna array design, the radiation characteristics of 4 × 1 linear arrays are fabricated. To validate the feasibility, we perform simulations and experiments. Simulation results show that the total efficiencies of the antenna array are higher than about 8.16 - 9.46 dBi for the scanning range between 0° to 60°. Measurement results display that the antenna has S11 reply less than -10 dB in the frequency area of 27.5 to 28.5 GHz and wide beamwidth (130.8° in elevation plan, 21.35° in azimuth plan). There is a high accord between the calculated and measured results and we consider that the results in this study can be well achieved by designers who design the wide beamwidth high-speed antennas of 5G mobile terminals.