A Highly Compact Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna Array for 5G Millimeter Wave Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a compact 1 × 4 antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) array for 5G millimeter-wave applications. The designed antenna operates over 24.19 GHz–29.15 GHz and 30.28 GHz–40.47 GHz frequency ranges. The proposed antenna provides a high gain of 8 dBi to 13.2 dBi and the highest gain is obtained at 40.3 GHz. The proposed antenna operates on frequency range-2 (FR2) and covers n257, n258, n260, and n261 frequency bands of 5G communication. The corrugations and RT/Duroid 5880 substrate are used to reduce the antenna size to 24 mm × 28.8 mm × 0.254 mm, which makes the antenna highly compact. Furthermore, the corrugations play an important role in the front-to-back ratio improvement, which further enhances the gain of the antenna. The corporate feeding is optimized meticulously to obtain an enhanced bandwidth and narrow beamwidth. The radiation pattern does not vary over the desired operating frequency range. In addition, the experimental results of the fabricated antenna coincide with the simulated results. The presented antenna design shows a substantial improvement in size, gain, and bandwidth when compared to what has been reported for an AVA with nearly the same size, which makes the proposed antenna one of the best candidates for application in devices that operate in the millimeter frequency range.