This paper describes a study of the design conditions of a planar surface dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) reactors for generating negative air ions. The capacity of negative air ion generated by the surface DBD reactor is affected by the shape, area ratio and the location of the discharge and induction electrodes of it. To study the optimal design conditions of DBD reactors, the electrodes printed on the substrate of a PCB board is utilized to conduct kind of experiments: the distance of the each electrode along with the X-Y axis, the area ratio of the discharge electrode to induction electrode, and the symmetrical and asymmetrical location of two electrodes. The ion generation capacity is inverse proportional to the gap increases along with X-Y axis. And the optimum ion concentration generated by the ionizer was inspected when the electrodes area ratio was 3 and 5 times of the symmetrical and asymmetrical experimental condition respectively.