Vivaldi antenna

Updated February 13, 2009

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New for February 2009! The Vivaldi antenna, also known as the tapered slot antenna (TSA) is easy to fabricate on a circuit board, and can provide ultra-wide wide bandwidth.

The Vivaldi antenna was first discussed in a 1979 IEEE European Microwave Conference paper by P. J. Gibson in a paper entitled The Vivaldi Aerial. In the abstract he describes it as "a new member of the class of aperiodic continuously scaled antenna structures, as such, it has theoretically unlimited instantaneous bandwidth." However, he never said why he named it the "Vivaldi" aerial. If you ask an antenna engineer where the name came from, chances are he'll tell you Vivaldi was the inventor. Something is a little strange here, and we intend to straighten it out.

Below is an image of a Vivaldi antenna that we grabbed from U. S. patent 6,043,785, Broadband fixed-radius slot antenna arrangement invented by Ronald A. Marino. This figure was provided as"prior art", and provides a good picture of how the antenna works. A microstrip line (dotted) on the opposite site crosses a slot line. The microstrip line is terminated in an open circuit a quarterwave away, while the slot-line is terminated in a short circuit a quarterwave away. The effect of this interface is that the energy in the microstrip is fed to the slot line, and propagates to the right. The slot line gap opens up according to an equation which we will ignore for now.

More to come!