1656
6, JUNE 2008
A Novel Compact Spiral Electromagnetic Band-Gap
(EBG) Structure
Qiu-Rong Zheng, Yun-Qi Fu, and Nai-Chang Yuan
Abstract—A novel compact electromagnetic band-gap (EBG)
structure in a spiral shape is presented and investigated. This
structure significantly enlarges the capacitance between neigh-
boring elements. The simulations and experimental results have
proved that the size of the spiral structure is only 30.9% of the
conventional EBG structure. Two applications have been shown,
including patch antenna with the spiral EBG structure and a
double-element microstrip antenna array with low mutual cou-
pling. The measured results show that a gain improvement over
3 dB and a significant reduction of cross polarization in H-plane
are obtained. A 6 dB reduction of mutual coupling is achieved in a
double-element EBG microstrip antenna array.
Index Terms—Cross-polarization, electromagnetic band-gap
(EBG), patch antenna, radiation pattern, surface wave.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N RECENT years, there has been significant interest in in-
vestigating electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures, and
varieties of EBG structure have been proposed for application in
electromagnetic and antenna community [1]–[9]. As early EBG
lattice periods were half-wavelength at the center band-gap fre-
quency, practical applications of EBG structures had difficulties
in accommodating their physical sizes. So, realizing compact
EBG structures become an important requirement. Recently, the
high impedance ground plane (HIGP) was proposed by Sieven-
piper et al. [3]. Compared with other EBG structures, such as
with rods and holes, this structure has the important feature
of compactness [10]. However, in some practical applications,
such as in antenna array, the spacing of neighboring antenna
element has to be less than a half wavelength of operating fre-
quency, the Sievenpiper’s EBG structure is still too large to be
used in an antenna. Here, we propose a novel EBG structure,
which can be considered an extension of Sievenpiper’s EBG
structure, and report its application in the antenna field. We refer
to this structure as the spiral EBG.
The spiral EBG structure consists of four parts, which are: 1)
spiral-like metal patch; 2) a ground plane; 3) a dielectric sub-
strate; and 4) connecting via. The structure of spiral-like metal
Manuscript received September 12, 2006; revised January 20, 2007. This
work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of China under
Contract 60401011.
Q.-R. Zheng was with College of Electronic Science and Engineering,
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China. He is
now with the Air Force Engineering University, Xi’an 710038, China (e-mail:
zqr1620@sina.com).
Y.-Q. Fu is with the College of Electronic Science and Engineering, National
University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
N.-C. Yuan is with Department of Electronic Science and Technology, Na-
tional University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.
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.2008.923305
0018-926X/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO.
patch is more complicated than other EBGs although it is more
compact in size. The spiral structure significantly enlarges the
capacitance between the neighboring elements. To describe the
performance of this new structure, we compare it to Sieven-
piper’s single-layered EBG structure. There are other overlap-
ping patch geometries that have achieved more capacitance per
square unit than the spiral structure, but these overlapping con-
structs require another printed circuit board layer, resulting in
greater fabrication cost and complexity. As an example a patch
antenna with the spiral EBG is described and results presented.
The measured results reveal that the spiral EBG structure can
significantly improve the patch antenna’s performance. The an-
tenna gain is increased, the cross polarization of H-plane pattern
is reduced significantly and the pattern becomes smooth. The
mutual coupling between antenna elements is reduced also.
II. SPIRAL-LIKE EBG STRUCTURE
The conventional EBG structure has a wide band-gap and
compact nature [10], [11]. The inductor results from the cur-
rent flowing through the connecting via. The gap between the
conductor edges of two adjacent cells introduces equivalent ca-
pacitance . Thus a two dimensional periodic LC network is
realized which results in the frequency band-gap and the center
frequency of the band-gap is determined by the formula
(1)
From (1), it can be seen that in order to achieve an even more
compact EBG structure, the equivalent capacitance and in-
ductance should be increased. But in the EBG design pro-
cedure, if the dielectric material and its thickness have been
chosen, the inductance cannot be altered. Therefore, only the
capacitance can be enlarged. For the conventional EBG struc-
ture shown in Fig. 1, the lateral length of the patch element
verges on adjacent cells allowing the equivalent capacitance
to increase, whereas the area of the patch has not been utilized.
The novel spiral EBG structure shown in Fig. 2 makes better
use of the patch area to increase the capacitance. The dark color
parts in this figure represent the metallic periodic structure,
which is etched on a dielectric substrate. It can be considered as
a distorted conventional EBG structure. The length of adjacent
edges increased in a spiral manner as shown in Fig. 2(b).
The unit cell is bounded by a dash line. There are only four
microstrip lines in the structure, such that the space in the
center area of the patch has been utilized efficiently. Increasing
the length of microstrip will increase the capacitance. This
compact EBG structure will work also at a lower frequency
than Sievenpiper’s EBG structure which usually is a larger size.
ZHENG et al.: A NOVEL COMPACT SPIRAL EBG STRUCTURE
Fig. 1. Conventional EBG structure (a) top view and (b) side view.
Fig. 2. Novel spiral-like EBG structure (a) top view and (b) structure of capac-
itance.
To verify the properties of the proposed spiral EBG structure,
a novel EBG structure and a conventional EBG structure that
operate at the same center frequency are designed for compar-
ison. These periodic cells are printed on a dielectric slab with
permittivity and thickness mm. For the spiral
EBG structure, the element parameters are chosen as follows:
the periodic spacing is mm, the gap between neigh-
boring elements is mm, the width of microstrip line is
mm, the length of microstrip line is mm. The
radius of the via is mm. For the conventional EBG struc-
ture, the element parameters are as follows: the periodic spacing
is mm, the gap between neighboring elements is
mm. The radius of via is also chosen as mm.
The cell size of spiral EBG structure is only 30.9% of the con-
ventional one.
The simulation is conducted using HFSS. The dispersion
diagrams of the two EBG structure are shown in Fig. 3. We
observe a complete frequency band-gap between the first and
second mode in both cases. For the spiral EBG structure shown
in Fig. 3(a), the band-gap is centered at 3.25 GHz and spans the
frequencies from 3.01 to 3.44 GHz; while for the conventional
EBG structure shown in Fig. 3(b), the band-gap is a little wider
and spans the frequency range 2.87 to 3.61 GHz.
To further investigate the properties of new spiral EBG struc-
ture, a 6 6 spiral array and a conventional EBG structure array
have been fabricated and measured. The monopole method [2] is
applied to measure the band-gap characteristics of the two EBG
structures. The measured results are shown in Fig. 4. The trans-
mission coefficient is presented for comparison. In Fig. 4,
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Fig. 3. Dispersion diagram of EBG structure (a) spiral (b) conventional.
band-gaps are evident for both cases. The frequency range of
, which is dB lower than the maximum of transmission
coefficient in TM polarization surface wave, extends from 3.06
to 3.47 GHz for spiral EBG structure and the conventional struc-
ture is from 3.08 to 3.58 GHz. The band-gap of spiral structure
is narrower than that of the conventional structure. The reason is
that the capacitance of spiral structure is much larger than that
of the conventional structure.
Various spiral EBG cases with different microstrip length
are fabricated and measured to investigate the effect of the mi-
crostrip length. The gap width, substrate permittivity and thick-
ness were kept the same as in the previous case. We fabricated
two spiral EBG structures with microstrip lengths 9.7 mm and
20.7 mm. The measured results are shown in Fig. 5. For the
shorter 9.7 mm long strip, the central frequency is at 3.55 GHz.
When the strip is 20.7 mm long and the strip width is narrowed
to 0.23 mm, the central frequency is 2.3 GHz. By adjusting the
length of the strip, the central frequency of band-gap can be
varied over a wide frequency range. This tunable feature should
make the spiral EBG structure useful in practical applications.
One EBG structure can be used in a series of band-gaps without
changing the periodic length.
III. APPLICATION TO PATCH ANTENNAS
A. Patch Antenna Performance Improvement
Surface waves can be excited on a patch antenna and they
deteriorate the antenna’s performance. When the surface waves
meet the edges and corners of the finite ground plane, they ra-
diate from these places due to the discontinuity of the medium.
1658
Fig. 4. Measured results of transmission coefficient of the EBG structure (a)
spiral and (b) conventional.
The combined radiation of the radiating patch and the ground
plane edges interferes to form a series of multipath lobes and
nulls at various angles. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of
the new spiral EBG, we fabricate two shorted patch antennas as
shown in Fig. 6. The patch dimensions are 15.3 15 mm and the
antenna is designed to operate at 3.25 GHz on a 2-mm-thick sub-
strate with the relative permittivity of 2.65. One shorted patch
antenna has been manufactured with a spiral EBG surrounding
it while the other has no spiral structure. At the same time, a
space (6.5 mm) was provided between the patch and the EBG
element in order to lower the coupling between them. The con-
ventional EBG structure is too large to include with the patch
antenna.
As shown in Fig. 7, the conventional patch antenna has some
ripples in the E-plane pattern, while the patch antenna with
spiral EBG has a much smoother radiation pattern and the pat-
tern becomes symmetrical and narrow. It indicates that in the
latter case surface waves are suppressed, and diffractions at the
boundaries of the finite size ground plane are reduced. The sur-
face wave improvement is most evident in the E-plane pattern,
where the large ripple has been removed [Fig. 7(a)], producing
a more pronounced pattern. For the conventional patch antenna,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 6, JUNE 2008
Fig. 5. Measured results of transmission coefficient of two spiral EBG struc-
tures with different strip length (a) 9.7 mm and (b) 20.7 mm.
a maximum ripple of approximately dB at the direction
of occurs in the E-plane, for patch antenna with spiral
EBG the ripple at the same angle drops to approximately 0.5
dB, an improvement of 7 dB. In addition, between the angles of
and , the radiation level decreases 8 dB at least.
The H-plane pattern [Fig. 7(b)] also becomes smoother, and the
back lobe is reduced slightly. Finally, the gain of the main lobe
shows a 4 dB improvement.
The H-plane cross polarization levels for the ordinary shorted
patch antenna shown in Fig. 8 are extremely high, which is pro-
duced by the discontinuity of the shorting pins and is common
for the shorted patch antenna [12]. With the spiral EBG struc-
ture, the H-plane cross-polarization decrease is very obvious. In
the worst case, in the direction of , the cross polarization
level decrease is 7.5 dB. Also at the peak cross-polar level of
the normal patch, the cross polar level has been decreased by 20
dB.
B. Mutual Coupling Reduction
The surface wave plays a dominant role in the mutual
coupling between the antenna array elements. Since the EBG
structure has the ability to suppress surface waves, three
columns of spiral-like EBG structure are inserted between
two coupled patch antennas to reduce the mutual coupling, as
ZHENG et al.: A NOVEL COMPACT SPIRAL EBG STRUCTURE
Fig. 6. Photograph of (a) conventional shorted patch antenna and (b) proposed
spiral EBG shorted patch antenna.
Fig. 7. Measured radiation pattern (a) E-plane and (b) H-plane.
shown in Fig. 9. The dimensions of the antenna element and
EBG cell are the same as those in Fig. 6(b). The distance be-
tween the centers of the two antennas is 44.8 mm less than half
the operating wavelength. If the conventional EBG structure
is employed, only one element can be inserted between the
two coupled antennas because of its large size. The measured
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Fig. 8. Measured cross-polarization of H-plane.
Fig. 9. Photograph of two patch antenna structures: with and without spiral
EBG.
Fig. 10. Comparison of mutual coupling using different patch antenna struc-
tures: with and without spiral- like EBG.
results are shown in Fig. 10. Without the EBG structure a strong
mutual coupling of dB occurs between the antennas.
When the EBG is employed, a 6 dB mutual coupling reduction
is achieved at 3.25 GHz. This comparison demonstrates the
capability of the spiral-like EBG structure to reduce mutual
coupling.
The improvements shown in Figs. 7(a), 7(b), 8, and 10, are
very significant in lowering the mutual coupling between an-
tenna elements and improving the directivity of the antenna
array.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a novel compact EBG structure in a spiral shape
is investigated. The simulations and experimental results have
1660 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 6, JUNE 2008
shown that the structure leads to compact antennas. The period
size of the spiral structure is only 0.06 at the desired band-gap
frequency. Two examples were presented and showed the ad-
vantages of the new structure. These were a patch antenna with
the spiral EBG structure and a double-element microstrip an-
tenna array. Compared to a conventional patch antenna of the
same size, the measured results show that the spiral EBG struc-
ture can significantly improve the patch antenna’s radiation pat-
tern and lower mutual coupling. The antenna gain is increased,
the cross polarization of H-plane is reduced significantly and
the pattern becomes smooth. A 6 dB reduction of mutual cou-
pling was achieved in a double-element EBG microstrip antenna
array. The improvements demonstrated with the new spiral EBG
structure should provide a strong foundation for designing fu-
ture EBG phased antenna arrays.
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Qiu-Rong Zheng was born in Fujian, China, on
November 10, 1973. He received the M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees from National University of Defense
Technology, Changsha, China, in 2003 and 2007,
respectively.
He is now working at the Air Force Engineering
University, Xi’an, China. His research interests in-
clude electromagnetic band-gap materials, computa-
tional electromagnetics, micro-strip antenna, and slot
antenna array.
Yun-Qi Fu was born in Tianjin, China, in 1975. He
received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Na-
tional University of Defense Technology, Changsha,
China, in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
His research interests include computational elec-
tromagnetic and EBG structure. He is also interested
in the analysis of frequency selective surfaces, and
micro-strip antenna.
Nai-Chang Yuan was born in Anhui, China in 1965.
He received the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree in
microwave theory and techniques from the Univer-
sity of Electronic Science and Technology of China
(UESTC), Chengdu, in 1991 and 1994, respectively.
Previously, he was with the Department of Elec-
tronic Technology. He is currently a Professor and
the Head of the Department of Electronic Science
and Technology, National University of Defense
Technology, Changsha, China. His research interests
are in microwave circuits and antennas, ultrawide
band technology, electromagnetic scattering and electromagnetic bandgap
materials