IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO.

1, JANUARY 2008

17

Design of Ultrawideband Planar Monopole Antennas

of Circular and Elliptical Shape
Amin M. Abbosh and Marek E. Bialkowski, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractAn efficient approach is described for designing

ultrawideband (UWB) antennas in the form of planar monopoles
of elliptical and circular shape. To avoid the time consuming
trial-and-error approach presented in other works, simple design
formulas for this type of radiators are described and their validity
is tested via electromagnetic analysis and measurements. Full
electromagnetic wave investigations are performed assuming
three types of substrates with wide range of dielectric constant
and thickness. The presented results show that the proposed
method can be applied directly to design planar antennas that
cover the ultrawide frequency band from 3.1 GHz to more than
10.6 GHz. Four types of monopole antennas were manufactured
using RT6010LM substrate and their operation was tested in
terms of return loss, radiation pattern characteristics, gain, and
time domain response. The developed antennas feature UWB
behavior with near omnidirectional characteristics and good
radiation efficiency. The time domain transmission tests between
two identical elements show that the manufactured circular
monopoles offer better performance in terms of distortionless
pulse transmission than their elliptically shaped counter parts.
These antennas are also assessed in terms of fidelity factor. The
manufactured antennas show a high fidelity factor which is more
than 90% for the face-to-face orientation.
Index TermsAntenna design, planar antenna, ultrawideband
(UWB) antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION
ANY EMERGING microwave techniques and applications aim at using ultrashort pulses on the order of
nanoseconds. In the frequency domain, such signals occupy an
ultrawideband (UWB) frequency spectrum. In 2002, US-FCC
has assigned the frequency band of 3.110.6 GHz with respect
to these emerging UWB activities [1]. The primary objective
of UWB is the possibility of achieving high data rate communication in the presence of existing wireless communication
standards. For example, the recent IEEE protocol 802.11 g
provides only 54 Mbps data rate. The use of UWB can give
data rates of the order of hundreds of megabits per second. In
addition to wireless communications, the use of UWB signals
is envisaged in microwave imaging applications. This is motivated by the fact that such signals offer an increased resolution
of imaged objects [2][4].

Manuscript received April 25, 2006; revised September 2, 2007. This work
was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grants DP0449996
and DP0773082. The work of A. M. Abbosh was supported by a Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
The authors are with the School of Information Technology and Electrical
Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia, (e-mail:
abbosh@itee.uq.edu.au; meb@itee.uq.edu.au).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2007.912946

Radio and imaging systems, employing UWB, require suitable antennas as transducers between UWB transceivers and the
propagating medium. To this purpose, several planar monopole
antennas with various shapes have been devised [5][14]. The
shortcoming of these planar UWB antenna designs is that they
are based on the lengthy trial and error method that involves
computationally intensive full wave electromagnetic simulations. When one decides to design an antenna using a different
dielectric substrate, the time consuming design process has
to be fully repeated. In such circumstances, the designers are
interested in having simple design formulas that provide a very
good approximation to the final design when sophisticated
EM analysis and design software packages are applied. The
present paper addresses this issue and provides simple design
formulas, which are suitable for UWB antennas in the form of
planar monopoles fed from a microstrip line. It is shown that
the difference between values of the design parameters, i.e.,
dimensions of antenna structure, is less than 10% compared
with the optimized values obtained using the commercial
software Ansoft HFSS [15]. The paper is organized as follows.
Section II describes the proposed design method. Section III
presents results of simulations using Ansoft HFSS. Section IV
reports on experimental results and Section V concludes the
findings of this paper.
II. DESIGN
Configurations of the UWB antennas, which are investigated here, are presented in Fig. 1. The structures shown in
Fig. 1(a) and (c) are created by a planar conducting surface
formed by the intersection of either two ellipses or two circles
in a two-side conductor-coated substrate. The primary radiating
element and the microstrip feed are on one side of substrate
while the ground plane is on its other side. In these structures,
the surface electric current flowing on an elliptical or circular
shaped conductor can be regarded as the primary source of
radiation. Here, we call them E-monopoles. In turn, the structures shown in Fig. 1(b) and (d) are complementary to those in
Fig. 1(a) and (c) and are named here as planar EC-monopoles.
The use of the terms of planar monopoles requires an extra
explanation. This is because the considered antennas resemble
other types of antennas known in the antenna literature. The
initial structure of planar monopole formed by a square patch
vertically positioned above a horizontal ground plane and fed
from a coaxial line was introduced in [16]. The extension of
this concept was made in [8], where the patch and the finite size
ground were proposed to be formed in one plane. The justification for the use of the name monopole in [16] stemmed from
the fact that a coaxially fed wire monopole was stretched and

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008

Fig. 1. Configurations of the four designed UWB antennas. The radiating element with the feeder is on the top layer while the ground plane (GND) is on the
bottom layer. (a) elliptical E-monopole, (b) elliptical EC-monopole, (c) circular
E-monopole, and (d) circular EC-monopole.

became planar. In turn, the structure introduced in [8] includes

a finite ground plane, and thus can be viewed differently. In this
case, when both planar monopole and finite ground are considered as radiating elements, the entire structure resembles a
planar bow-tie antenna.
Our additional view on the operation of the planar E- and
EC-monopoles introduced in this paper is as follows. These
antenna elements feature a slot between the monopole and
ground, which, in our opinion, plays an important role in obtaining UWB behavior. This is because it forms a travellingwave type antenna. The size of the slot opening defines its lowest
frequency of operation. In fact, this opening is about half-wavelength at this frequency.
Having explained the operation and justification for the use of
the term planar monopoles, the next step concerns their design.
Here, we present a simple design method to achieve broadband
operation of the radiating structures of Fig. 1(a)(d). In all of
the four cases, we assume that the planar antenna element is
positioned in the - plane.
The design process is commenced with the assumption that
a microstrip line feeding these antenna elements is chosen to
have 50 characteristic impedance. The width of the microstrip
to give characteristic impedance
equal
transmission line,
to 50 can be calculated using standard design formulas, as
presented in [17]. The formula requires the information about
the substrate thickness and its relative dielectric constant .
These two parameters are known once the substrate is selected.
The remaining design steps are summarized as follows. Depending on the lowest frequency of operation ( ), and the approximate effective dielectric constant of the composite (air, the width ( ), and
substrate) dielectric,
length ( ) of the upper part of the antenna structure, excluding

the feeder, are calculated [18] as being half and quarter of the
at the frequency
. Therefore
effective wavelength
and
, where
is speed of light in free space.
The radiating slot is formed by the intersection of two ellipses
&
(or circles) in the manner shown in Fig. 1. The diameters
and the ratios
&
are chosen as
,
,
for the ellipses, and
for the
circles.
The ground plane for the elliptical (circular) monopoles is in
the shape of a half ellipse (circle) whose dimensions are chosen
to be similar to those for the larger ellipse (circle) of the radiating
structure. This choice is made in order to get a smooth tapering
between the radiating structure and the ground plane.
Centers of the two ellipses or the two circles are chosen such
that width of the radiator at the feeding point is equal to width
of the microstrip feeder, whereas width of the slot between
the radiator and the ground plane is around half of the feeder
,
for
width. Therefore
the E-monopoles and
for the EC- monopoles,
and
are centers of the large and small ellipses (or
where
circles) measured from the end of the feeder.
As noted earlier in this section, each of the structures shown
in Fig. 1 can be viewed as a vertical monopole located a quarter
of the effective wavelength above a finite ground plane or
a horizontal bow-tie dipole of approximately half-effective
wavelength in the horizontal ( ) and vertical ( ) directions.
All of these structures include a smooth tapered slot between
the monopole and the ground. Its opening is about half of the
effective wavelength at the lowest frequency of operation.
III. RESULTS OF SIMULATIONS
The presented design method uses the effective dielectric
constant ( ), given as the average value of the relative permittivity of the two mediums (substrate and air), to work out the
dimensions of the E and EC monopoles. In practice, one can
expect that this effective dielectric constant can also depend on
the substrate thickness and the operational frequency. Therefore
can give only the first order
the formula
approximation to work out optimal dimensions of the E and
EC monopoles. In order to investigate this approximation, we
undertake full electromagnetic wave investigations for a range
of substrates of various permittivity and thickness.
First, we present a number of designs assuming DuPont951
,
and
material with
. Parameters for UWB elliptical and
circular E and EC monopole antennas obtained using the
above presented design formulas are shown in Table I assuming a 2.5 GHz value for ( ). Table I also includes the
optimum values of the design parameters obtained using Ansoft
HFSSv10. This optimization process aimed at near omnidirectional characteristics of the antennas with 10 dB return loss
bandwidth of at least 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. A comparison between
the dimensions obtained from the use of the proposed formulas
and those generated using Ansoft HFSS is shown in Table I.
The difference is less than 10%, and thus indicates that the
proposed design formulas are quite accurate. The presented
values show that the designed UWB antennas are of compact

ABBOSH AND BIALKOWSKI: DESIGN OF UWB PLANAR MONOPOLE ANTENNAS

19

TABLE I
CALCULATED AND OPTIMIZED VALUES OF THE DESIGN PARAMETERS IN (MM)

Fig. 2. Variation of return loss with frequency for the designed antennas.

size (in comparison with the operational wavelength), which is

advantageous in applications requiring compact RF front ends.
Fig. 2 shows variations of return losses with frequency for the
four designed monopole antennas assuming DuPont951. The
obtained results indicate that all of the designed antennas have
UWB characteristics with an impedance bandwidth covering at
least 3.110.6 GHz assuming a 10 dB return loss reference. As
seen in Fig. 2, the 10 dB return loss bandwidth for the E type
elliptical and circular monopoles commences at a frequency (of
about 2.5 GHz) lower than the EC-type counter parts (approximately 3 GHz).
From the UWB applications point of view, the antenna is usually required to have an omnidirectional radiation pattern (here
in the - plane). This requirement is well fulfilled in the lower
part of UWB (3 and 5 GHz), where almost a perfect donut-shape
radiation pattern is observed, as shown in Fig. 3 for the elliptical
E-monopole. However, it slowly diverges from ideal at the upper
frequencies (7 GHz and above). This comes from the fact that
the tapered slot between the monopole and the finite ground,
being part of this antenna, is responsible for forming a directional pattern in the -plane. As a result, we obtain a wide beam
in the direction along the slot while shallow nulls are observed
in the directions orthogonal to the slot. Similar results were obtained for the other designed antennas. They are confirmed by
measurements in Section IV.
Gain of the designed antennas is revealed in Fig. 4. It varies
between about 0.5 to 4.7 dB over the required bandwidth for
to 2.5 dB for
the E-monopoles, whereas it is between
the EC-monopoles. These results indicate that the E-monopoles

Fig. 3. Three dimensional radiation pattern for the elliptical electric monopole
at different frequencies.

Fig. 4. Variation of the peak realized gain with frequency for the designed
antennas.

show a higher gain compared with their complementary counter

parts (EC-monopoles).
Using a substrate with a high dielectric constant and a direct
microstrip feeder may cause deterioration in the radiation efficiency of the antenna (meant as the ratio of power radiated
to power delivered to the feeder). To check this case, variation
of the radiation efficiency with frequency for the designed antennas was calculated with HFSS software. These calculations

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008

TABLE II
CALCULATED VALUES OF DESIGN PARAMETERS IN (MM) FOR THE THREE SELECTED SUBSTRATES WITH DIFFERENT THICKNESS

Fig. 5. Variation of the return loss with frequency for different values of substrate thickness. The substrate is RO4003C with " = 3:38.

have shown that the designed antennas have always a good efficiency which is greater than 92%.
In order to test the validity of the design method for different
types of substrates with wide range of thickness ( ), it was applied to design elliptical E-monopoles using the following sub,
strates; Rogers RO4003C with
; Rogers RT6010LM with
,
, in addition to DuPont951. The thickness of the above
three substrates was varied from 0.5 to 1.5 mm. The software
HFSSv10 was used to simulate performance of the antennas
with the dimensions shown in Table II. No optimization of dimensions was used in this case. The results of the simulation for
the return loss are shown in Figs. 57. It is apparent that the effect of the substrate thickness on the return loss behavior is small
with respect to the lower frequency range of the UWB, which
is from about 3 to 8 GHz. This is especially true for low dielec). The variation
tric constant substrates (the case of
in return loss as a function of substrate thickness becomes more
pronounced for frequencies above 8 GHz and for substrates with
and
).
a larger relative dielectric constant (
However, irrespective from the substrate thickness and its permittivity, the presented formulas deliver monopoles dimensions
which cover the required UWB 10 dB return loss bandwidth,

Fig. 6. Variation of the return loss with frequency for different values of substrate thickness. The substrate is DuPont951 with " = 7:8.

Fig. 7. Variation of the return loss with frequency for different values of substrate thickness. The substrate is RT6010LM with " = 7:8.

and
where the
with exception of
return loss becomes slightly lower than 10 dB for frequencies
between 8 and 10.6 GHz.
The design steps for the antennas were repeated assuming this
time different values for the lowest frequency of operation ( ).
The substrate assumed in this simulation was DuPont951 with

ABBOSH AND BIALKOWSKI: DESIGN OF UWB PLANAR MONOPOLE ANTENNAS

Fig. 8. Comparison between the designed low frequency and the results obtained via simulation. The substrate used is DuPont951 with " = 7:8 and
h = 0:5 mm.

21

Fig. 10. Variation of measured return loss with frequency for the designed antennas.

Fig. 11. Measured radiation patterns for the E-monopole antenna at different
frequencies.

Fig. 9. (a) Photographs of the manufactured elliptical E-monopole, (b) elliptical EC-monopole, (c) circular E-monopole, and (d) the circular EC-monopole.

0.5 mm thickness, and was considered to vary from 1.5 GHz

up to 3 GHz. Simulation results for the return losses in the frequency band of 1 to 6 GHz are shown in Fig. 8. With respect
to the commencement of the 10 dB return loss bandwidth, there
is only a 5% difference between the assumed and the values
shown in the plots in Fig. 8. This confirms that the presented
design method can very well predict the commencement of the
10 dB return loss bandwidth for all of the investigated planar
monopole antennas.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The four types (circular and elliptical of E and EC type) of
UWB printed monopole antennas were manufactured using
the substrate Rogers RT6010LM with thickness 0.64 mm. The
photographs of the manufactured antennas including coaxial
feeding ports are shown in Fig. 9. The design parameters for the
developed antennas were calculated using the proposed method
,
,
,
and the values were:
, and
.

The measured results for the return loss are presented

in Fig. 10. Return loss measurements were obtained using
HP8510/HP8530 network analyzer in an anechoic chamber.
The results shown in Fig. 10 indicate that the four types of
antennas feature UWB behavior with bandwidth from 3.1 GHz
to more than 15 GHz assuming a 10 dB return loss reference.
The measured far field radiation patterns of the E-monopole
plane (
) and the
antenna in the two principal planes,
plane (
) are shown in Fig. 11 at different frequencies.
The radiation patterns reveal a near omnidirectional behavior in
plane. A better quality omnidirectional pattern in the
the
plane is observed at lower frequencies (36 GHz) of UWB. This
agrees well with the finding obtained from the computer simulated radiation patterns, as reported in Section III. The measured radiation patterns of the other antennas exhibit almost the
same behavior and therefore they are not shown here. In addition to radiation patterns, the antenna gain was also measured.
The measurement was performed using a standard double ridge
corrugated horn antenna as a reference gain antenna. The distance between the transmitter and the receiver was 1 m. The results of measurements presented in Fig. 12 show that the gain is
between 0.5 and 3.9 dB for the E-monopoles and between 0.1
and 2.5 dB for the EC-monopoles in the frequency range 3 to
10 GHz. Radiation efficiency of the four antennas was calculated using Ansoft HFSSv10 and it was found to be higher than
90% across the whole band.
The last test concerned the ability of the manufactured antennas to transmit and receive pulses without distortions. In this

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 1, JANUARY 2008

Fig. 12. Variation of measured gain with frequency for the designed antennas.

that changing the orientation of the receiving antenna has only a

little effect (more pronounced for E-monopoles) on the impulse
response. This confirms the omnidirectional behavior of the developed antennas.
The last step in the impulse response measurement is to calculate the fidelity factor, which in turn is related to the results
shown in Fig. 13. Using the method presented in [19], it was
found that the manufactured antennas had more than 90% fidelity factor in case of the circular antennas and around 80%
in case of elliptical antennas, for any orientation. Similar to the
results shown in Fig. 13, the best fidelity results were obtained
for the monopoles facing each other (0-degree orientation case).
In this case, all the manufactured antennas offered more than
90% fidelity. These values of fidelity factor as well as the small
amplitude distortions observed in Fig. 13 confirm the high capability of the developed antennas to send and receive UWB
pulses with only small distortions.
V. CONCLUSION

Fig. 13. Impulse response between two identical UWB antennas for three different orientations.

case, two identical antennas were used to measure the transmission coefficient between their feeding ports in the frequency
domain and these results were transformed (via an inverse fast
Fourier transform IFFT) to the time domain using the time-domain capability of HP8510C/HP8530 VNA/receiver. Using this
function, the frequency range of 3.1 to 10.6 GHz in 100 steps
was selected as the basis for carrying out IFFT. Results of these
measurements when the two co-polarized antennas were separated by a distance of 45 cm are shown in Fig. 13. Three different
orientations were tested, the face-to-face orientation (shown in
the Fig. 13 as 0 ), the 45 and the 90 orientations, in which the
received antenna was rotated by the indicated angle in respect to
plane. In the presented figures, the received pulse
the normal
was scaled so that its peak value was equal to that of the transmitted pulse. From the four sets of figures, it can be observed
that the circular shaped monopoles provide a considerably better
performance in terms of distortionless transmission of a narrow
pulse (as far as amplitude distortion is of concern) compared
with the other antennas under investigation. It can also be noted

In this paper, a simple method for designing compact UWB

planar monopole antennas of elliptical and circular shape has
been presented. For the chosen configurations, the radiating
elements are formed by the intersection of two ellipses or two
circles. An explanation and justification for the use of the term
planar monopole for these structures has been given. Full electromagnetic wave simulations have shown that the proposed
design method is valid for a wide range of dielectric constants
and substrate thickness. The four proposed types of antennas
have been manufactured using RT6010LM substrate. The measurements have shown that the proposed design formulas enable the development of UWB antennas with suitable radiation
characteristics. The designed antennas cover the 3.110.6 GHz
band allocated to UWB systems in terms of return loss performance with well behaved omnidirectional radiation pattern
and more than 90% radiation efficiency. The time domain test
of transmission between two identical antennas at different
orientations has shown a better performance of the circular
shaped monopoles. This has been confirmed by calculations
of the fidelity factor being more than 90% for the face-to-face
orientation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The assistance of D. Bill from the School of Information
Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, in manufacturing the antennas is acknowledged.
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23

Amin M. Abbosh was born in Mosul, Iraq. He received the M.Sc. degree in communication systems
and the Ph.D. degree in microwave engineering
both from Mosul University, in 1991 and 1996,
respectively.
He worked as a Lecturer and was Head of the Information Engineering Department, Mosul University,
until 2003. In 2004, he joined the Centre for Wireless
Monitoring and Applications-Griffith University as a
Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He is now working as
a Research Fellow in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Australia. His research interests include antennas, radio wave propagation, microwave devices and design of ultrawideband wireless systems. He has published extensively (about 100 papers) in these research areas.

Marek E. Bialkowski (SM88F03) was born

in Sochaczew, Poland. He received the M.Eng.Sc.
degree in applied mathematics and the Ph.D. degree
in electrical engineering both from the Warsaw
University of Technology, in 1974 and 1979, respectively, and the D.Sc. Eng. degree in computer science
and electrical engineering from the University of
Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, in 2000.
He held teaching and research appointments at universities in Poland, Ireland, Australia, U.K., Canada,
Singapore, Hong Kong and Switzerland. At present,
he is a tenured Chair Professor leading the Telecommunications Research Group
in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. His research interests include antennas for mobile cellular and satellite communications, signal processing techniques for smart antennas, low profile antennas for reception of satellite broadcast TV programs,
near-field/far-field antenna measurements, electromagnetic modelling of waveguide feeds and transitions, conventional and spatial power combining techniques, six-port vector network analyzers, and medical and industrial applications of microwaves. He has published 500 technical papers, several book chapters and one book.