Planar miniature tapered-slot-fed annular slot antennas for ultrawide-band radios

A novel planar tapered-slot-fed annular slot antenna is proposed in this paper. The antenna utilizes a unique tapered-slot feeding structure and simultaneously possesses ultrawide bandwidth, almost uniform radiation patterns, and low profile. It is, hence, adequate for ultrawide-band (UWB) applications. By means of a normalized antenna transfer function, both frequency domain and time domain characteristics of the antenna are carefully investigated. Two measures, the uniformity related to the radiation patterns and the fidelity associated with the transient behaviors, are used to quantitatively describe the performance of an antenna over such an ultrawide bandwidth. Effects of varying the antenna´s geometric parameters on the performance are then investigated. Finally, the influence of minimizing the antenna dimension is discussed at the end of the paper.