STUDY AND DESIGN OF UWB M-SHAPED MONOPOLE AND VIVALDI ANTENNAS FOR WIRELESS APPLICATIONS

Abstract

This dissertation report details the study and design of two antennas, The M-shaped Monopole and the Vivaldi Antenna respectively for Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) applications. The M shaped monopole is a novel monopole antenna and the parameter analysis helps to understand new degrees of freedom thereby achieving compactness of the antenna structure compared to contemporary monopole designs like the Triangle monopole antenna. The final optimized design through IE3D of M-shaped monopole has been observed to work for almost the entire FCC approved UWB range from 3.5 GHz-10 GHz. Vivaldi antenna is one of the primary contenders for UWB operation. In this dissertation, a thorough mathematical analysis of the feeding mechanism of a Vivaldi antenna has been discussed and the same model has been further used to optimize the design of a Vivaldi antenna operating in the frequency range from 4 GHz — 6.7 GHz thus satisfying the FCC approved definition of a UWB antenna with bandwidth > 20% of the central frequency. Both the antennas have also been fabricated and both simulated and experimental results have been reported.