A compact wide-bandwidth Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna array with suppressed mutual coupling for 5G mm-wave applications

A modified miniaturized Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA) array with suppressed mutual coupling is proposed for broadband 5G millimeter wave (mm-wave) application. The configuration is constructed by using eight radiating elements with single 1-to-8 power divider networks. By adding several notch structures, printed on the ground plane, the mutual coupling between the array elements are suppressed. Therefore, the radiating system has maximal additional isolation of 35.6 dB, enhanced gain of 13.36 dB, and extended impedance bandwidth of 26.5–29.5 GHz. In order to validate the design of the radiating system, the AVA array configuration is fabricated and measured with an overall dimension of 21.45 × 52.35 × 0.787 mm3. The experimentally validated gain value of the conventional AVA array antenna and modified array antenna is 4.7–8.35 dB and 8.62–12.67, respectively.