Planar array

Anisotropy

Slot antenna

Engineering

Materials science

Radiation pattern

Aperture (computer memory)

Antenna aperture

Telecommunications

Computer science

Antenna (radio)

Acoustics

High-gain antenna

Directional antenna

Physics

Nanotechnology

Antenna measurement

Vivaldi antenna

Optics

Antenna array

Miniaturization

Reflective array antenna

Array gain

Phased array

Extremely high frequency

Dipole antenna

Optoelectronics

Electrical engineering

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation

A low-profile printed planar antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) array with good performance for future fifth-generation (5G) millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication applications is presented. The proposed structure is an 8 × 1 array with eight elements in E-plane, which is fed by a 1-to-8 power divider network. A novel feature called anisotropic metasurface (MS) is located at the aperture, resulting in low cutoff frequency reduced from 24.55 to 24.1 GHz for miniaturization. In addition, the phase distribution located at the aperture of AVA array can be corrected by adding MS. Thus, the gain of AVA array can be improved from 8.5-11.2 to 9.35-12 dB in the frequency band of 5G mmWave communication. Finally, to verify the designed methods, the proposed AVA with MS (AVA-MS) array was successfully fabricated and measured, which occupies an area of 6.11λg × 2.93λg × 0.08λg. The numerical and experimental results coincide well with each other, which certify the new method for achieving miniaturization and gain enhancement of our proposed AVA-MS array.

A New Method for Achieving Miniaturization and Gain Enhancement of Vivaldi Antenna Array Based on Anisotropic Metasurface