<title>Microstrip antenna on tunable substrate</title>

Abstract

The tunable patch antenna configurations are becoming popular and attractive in many aspects. This was mainly due to the advent of ferrite thin film technology and tunable substrate materials. The integration of monolithic microwave circuits and antennas are becoming easy today. In the development of magnetic tuning of microstrip patch on ferrite substrate is presented by Rainville and Harackewiez. Radiation characteristics of such antennas are presented by Pozer. Band width and radiation characteristics of such tunable antennas are measured and compared. Usually the substrate losses are considered in the analysis and metallization losses are assumed to be ideal. The analysis of magnetic tunable radiator including metallization and ferrite substrate losses are presented. However, all such tuning and integration of circuits and antennas are mainly on ferrite substrate due to magnetic tuning. Recently, Varadan et al. established that the BaxSr1-xTiO3 series ferroelectric materials such as Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) are well suited for microwave phase shifter applications. It could be possible to change the dielectric constant of these materials more than 50% depending on the BST composition, by changing the applied bias voltage. Also, the porosity of BST can be controlled during processing to produce dielectric constants in the range of 15 to 1500, with some trade off in tunability. In this paper, we are presenting the possibility of designing a microstrip patch antenna on such tunable substrate. Such antennas are having the major advantage of electronic tunability and compact size.© (1995) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.