Abstract
This paper presents a compact frequency reconfigurable antenna for flexible devices and conformal surfaces. The antenna consists of a simple easy to fabricate structure consisting of a stub loaded circular radiator, designed on commercially available RT5880 flexible substrate ( $\varepsilon _{\mathrm {r}} = 2.2$ ) with a thickness of 0.254 mm. The combination of stub loading and slot etching techniques are utilized to achieve the advantages of compactness, frequency reconfigurability, wide impedance bandwidth, and stable radiation pattern with structural conformability. The frequency reconfigurability is achieved by employing two p-i-n diodes. Simulated and experimental results showed that the antenna operates in various important commercial bands, such as S-band (2 GHz– 4 GHz), Wi-Max (3.5 GHz and 5.8 GHz), Wi-Fi (3.6 GHz, 5 GHz, and 5.9 GHz), 5G sub-6-GHz (3.5 GHz and 4.4 GHz – 5 GHz), and ITU-band (7.725 GHz – 8.5 GHz) with the additional advantages of structural conformability. Furthermore, the performance comparison of the proposed flexible antenna with the state-of-the-art flexible antennas in terms of compactness, frequency reconfigurability, and number of operating bands demonstrates the novelty of the proposed antenna and its potential application in heterogeneous applications.
Highlights
The world has witnessed a rapid revolution in the wireless communication industry due to the pressing demand to reach more users while maintaining a reliable communication system meeting the end-user requirements
The flexible antennas have over-performance compared to rigid devices, in terms of compactness, flexibility, durability, lightweight, and energy efficiency [4]
The antenna designers working on flexible antennas must address some challenges, including the shift of the resonant frequency and degradation impedance mismatch due to the variation of effective capacitance during bending of the antenna [5]
Summary
The world has witnessed a rapid revolution in the wireless communication industry due to the pressing demand to reach more users while maintaining a reliable communication system meeting the end-user requirements. The work proposed in [21] shows the compact size and more bands as compared to reported work in [22], the use of copper tape instead of practical diodes do not provide efficient results and limits their application for practical applications Another CPW fed tri-band antenna is presented in [23]. The high gain is achieved by compromising on antenna size, which limits its application for compact devices Another interesting work is reported in [26], where researchers used two varactor diodes to achieve continuous frequency reconfigurability. Besides a moderate gain, wide bandwidth, and low return loss characteristics, the antenna exhibits consistent results in both rigid and bending conditions This makes the antenna suitable for modern flexible devices like wearables, vehicle sensors, etc.
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