A SLOW-WAVE STRUCTURE WITH KOCH FRACTAL SLOT LOOPS

Jung-Hyo Kim, Il-Kwon Kim, Jong-Gwan Yook, and Han-Kyu Park Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Yonsei University Seoul, Korea Received 3 January 2002 ABSTRACT: In this Letter, a Koch slot loop in the ground plane has been utilized to obtain slow-wave characteristics, and its electrical performances are analyzed with the use of the ABCD matrix approach. The validity of this approach has been veried through experimental results, and this technique was then applied to microstrip patch antennas in order to obtain a small antenna size. The cross-sectional areas of this type of antenna are 47% to 65% smaller than those of conventional square patches. 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 34: 87 88, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.10381 Key words: Koch fractal slot loop; slow-wave structure; periodic structure; PBG; small size antenna INTRODUCTION

Figure 2 Slow-wave factor of unit cell

nas. Its characteristics are predicted by using an ABCD matrix approach.

SLOW-WAVE STRUCTURE WITH KOCH SLOT LOOPS

The slow-wave structure is not only appropriate to optimize different delay times between various transmission lines in highspeed digital circuits, but also to reduce overall circuit dimensions. In order to develop slow-wave structures, various techniques, such as metalinsulatorsemiconductor (MIS) transmission lines, ferromagnetic substrate microstrip lines, and cross-tie overlay coplanar waveguide (CPW), have been introduced and investigated by many researchers [13]. However, most of these structures use multilayer or high-cost substrates, thus imposing a high fabrication cost as well as difcult fabrication procedure. A structure recently proposed by Lin and Itoh [3] employs periodic slots in the ground plane and can be fabricated in a simple manner. In this Letter, a slow-wave structure with Koch fractal slot loops incorporated in the ground plane is proposed in order to control the slow-wave factor. This approach is then veried by applying this technique to useful applications, such as miniaturized microstrip patch anten-

By increasing capacitive and inductive loading effects, the spacelling property of Koch fractal geometry contributes to the increase of the effective length of the line. A slow-wave structure can be designed efciently by utilizing this property of Koch fractals. As shown in Figure 1, the unit cell of a Koch slot loop is printed in the ground plane, and a 50- line is printed on the other side of the substrate of r 2.5 and thickness h 0.508 mm. Two Koch fractal slot loops were designed; in Case A, the crosssectional area is L1 L2 4.5 4.5 mm and the slot width w 0.25 mm; in Case B, the cross-sectional area is L1 L2 3 3 mm, and the slot width w 0.1 mm. The S parameters of the unit cell obtained by full-wave electromagnetic simulations or experiments are transformed into ABCD matrices, and then the characteristic matrix equation is deduced. Next, the complex propagation constant of the unit cell is found by the following equation:

1 l

ln AD 2 AD 2
2

(1)

where l is the length of the unit cell, the attenuation constant, and the phase constant. The sign of the solution must be chosen to provide a physically meaningful value of . As shown in Figure 2,

Figure 1 Microstrip line with Koch slot loop (fractal factor 0.25) etched in the ground plane (Case A: L1L2 4.5 4.5 mm, w 0.25 mm; Case B: L1L2 3 3 mm, w 0.1 mm)

Figure 3 Equivalent circuit of unit cell

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Figure 4 Antenna conguration

the slow-wave factor (Ff), which is dened as /k0 is higher in Case A than in Case B. This is due to the fact that a larger slot loop has higher capacitance and inductance values, and thereby results in higher impedance. The equivalent circuit of the Koch slot loop unit cell, including the microstrip line, is shown in Figure 3. The equivalent circuit parameters of Case A are obtained as follows: Cs 0.5 pF, Ls 0.15 nH, C1 0.14 pF, L1 0.4 nH, C2 0.01 pF, C3 0.6 pF, R1 1.2 k, and R2 2.
SLOW-WAVE MICROSTRIP ANTENNA

Figure 5

Return loss of fabricated microstrip antenna

matrix approach. The slow-wave factor is proportional to the size of the Koch slot loops, but it is inversely proportional to the repetition period. Thus, enlarging the Koch slot loops and placing them closer together maximizes the size reduction in the microstrip antenna.
REFERENCES 1. Y.R. Kwon, V.M. Hietala and K.S. Champlin, Quasi-TEM analysis of slow-wave mode propagation on coplanar microstructure MIS transmission lines, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-35 (1987), 881 890. 2. H. Ogawa and T. Itoh, Slow-wave characteristics of ferromagnetic semiconductor microstrip line, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-35 (1987),1478 1482. 3. Y.D. Lin and T. Itoh, Frequency-scanning antenna using the crosstieoverlay slow-wave structures as transmission line, IEEE Trans Antennas Propagat AP-39 (1991), 377380. 4. C.C. Chang, R. Coccioli, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, Numerical and experimental characterization of slow-wave microstrip line on periodic ground plane, MTT-Symp Digest 3 (2000), 15331536. 5. R. Spickermann and N. Dagli, Experimental analysis of millimeter wave coplanar waveguide slow wave structures on GaAs, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory Tech MTT-42 (1994), 1918 1924. 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A slow-wave structure can be implemented with Koch slot loops incorporated in the ground plane, thereby reducing the size of the patch antenna. Figure 4 illustrates a microstrip patch antenna with Koch slot loops in the ground plane. As summarized in Table 1, four different antenna congurations with different periods for Cases A and B are tested. Figure 5 displays the measured return losses of four slow-wave antennas, as well as that of a conventional one. The fabricated antennas A1, A2, B1, and B2 resonate at 5.49, 6.82, 6.35, and 6.78 GHz, respectively, and the conventional microstrip patch antenna resonates at 8.95 GHz. Hence, with the same patch size, 24 to 38.7% lower resonance frequencies have been achieved compared to the conventional microstrip antenna; and for the same resonance frequency, 47 to 65% reduction in area was obtained. Furthermore, the impedance bandwidth is greater than that of the conventional antenna. The A1, A2, B1, B2, and conventional microstrip patch antenna have impedance bandwidths of 3.5%, 3.7%, 3.7%, 2.95%, and 1.8%, respectively, on the basis of VSWR 2:1. This is due to the fact that the apertures in the ground plane tend to decrease the quality factor of antennas, thus increasing the bandwidth.
CONCLUSIONS

In this Letter, a slow-wave structure with Koch fractal slot loops is proposed, and its characteristics are well predicted by the ABCD
TABLE 1 Design Parameters of Slow-Wave MSA and Conventional MSA (Fractal Factor: 0.25, Patch Size: 10 10 mm) Slot Size (mm2) Antenna Antenna Antenna Antenna A1 A2 B1 B2 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 33 33 Slot Width (mm) 0.25 0.25 0.1 0.1 Period (mm) 4.75 5.5 3.2 3.5

PRESENTATION OF THE SPECTRAL ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC FIELD INTEGRAL EQUATIONS USED IN G2DMULT FOR ANALYZING CYLINDRICAL STRUCTURES OF MULTIMATERIAL REGIONS
Jian Yang and Per-Simon Kildal Chalmers University of Technology S-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden Received 7 January 2002 ABSTRACT: When dealing with electromagnetic problems of threedimensional (3D) elements, such as dipoles, microstrip patches, and slots, in the vicinity of two-dimensional (2D) structures, it is very ef-

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