Antenna Design for UWB Radar Detection Application Master of Science Thesis

This master thesis has focused on the aspect of UWB antenna design for the impulse based UWB radar which is built on CMOS technology. The design of new UWB antenna faces some challenges. The antenna should be compact, preferably conformal, low cost for manufacture, and have good electrical performance, such as good matching, directional radiation performance over a wide band, good time response, etc. Keeping these goals in mind a compact and directional antipodal Vivaldi antenna was built. The antenna radiating structure is in the form of two exponentially tapered arms that lie on the opposite sides of the substrate. The antenna operates over the frequency band from 2.7 GHz to more than 12 GHz. It exhibits a directive radiation performance with a peak gain which is between 3.2dBi and 10.2dBi in the specified band. The time domain performance of the antenna shows negligible distortion of the pulse which makes it suitable to use with impulse based UWB radar. The antenna has linear phase response over the entire UWB frequency range and hence constant group delay which is vital for transmission and reception of sub-nanosecond pulses. Due to its planar profile, physically compact size, wide impedance bandwidth, directive performance over a wide bandwidth antipodal Vivaldi antenna is a good candidate for use with Novelda UWB radar chip and other UWB integrated circuits and portable electronics. The antenna is being used for ranging, one and two dimensional tracking along with Novelda R2A UWB radar chip.