Plasma jet printing of copper and silver antennas operating at 2.4 GHz

Abstract

Printing has emerged as a technically feasible and economically viable approach to fabricate antennas on a wide range of rigid and flexible substrates. Printing offers several advantages such as rapid prototyping, minimal number of processing steps and minimal equipment needs relative to conventional microfabrication and other antenna manufacturing techniques, versatility in the choice of substrates and low cost. Here we use a plasma-based printing approach to print self-sintered copper and silver antennas. The morphology of the printed films is continuous with nanoparticles agglomerated and fused together under the influence of the plasma. The printed antennas exhibit a reflection coefficient of about −20 dB or lower and bandwidth over 10% at a resonant frequency around 2.4 GHz. The results show the feasibility of printing high performance antennas on flexible substrates such as polyimide using plasma printing technology.