Meander Line Antenna Research Articles

Comprehensive study of printed antenna with the handset modeling

ABSTRACTThis article presents a comprehensive study on the performance of a compact multiband antenna operating in LTE700, GSM850, GSM 900, DCS1800, PCS 1900, UMTS 2100, most of LTE bands (especially the low‐frequency LTE 700 band), and wireless applications. The antenna consists of a monopole in conjunction with meander line antenna. An EBG structure is used to miniaturize the antenna size and to enhance the gain in the direction away from the antenna to lower the SAR within the human body. The EBG structure also contributes in open the operating bands. The proposed antenna is tested using the four recommended test positions of the CTIA association where the proposed antenna reveals good performance in all test cases. Return loss, radiation patterns, SAR, and efficiency of this antenna are computed in free space, in the presence of handset (keypad, battery, speaker camera, RF circuit, and LCD) in talking position, in standby position, in packaging, and as well as in the presence of head and hand in free space and in a car. The SAR values are taken into account not to exceed the standard safety levels. In addition, radiation efficiencies of these handset antennas are computed in the presence of head and hand. All simulation results are performed using the CST software. Simulation results are in good agreement with the measurement results. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:974–980, 2016

Antenna-in-package system integrated with meander line antenna based on LTCC technology

We present an antenna-in-package system integrated with a meander line antenna based on low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) technology. The proposed system employs a meander line patch antenna, a packaging layer, and a laminated multi-chip module (MCM) for integration of integrated circuit (IC) bare chips. A microstrip feed line is used to reduce the interaction between patch and package. To decrease electromagnetic coupling, a via hole structure is designed and analyzed. The meander line antenna achieved a bandwidth of 220 MHz with the center frequency at 2.4 GHz, a maximum gain of 2.2 dB, and a radiation efficiency about 90% over its operational frequency. The whole system, with a small size of 20.2 mm×6.1 mm×2.6 mm, can be easily realized by a standard LTCC process. This antenna-in-package system integrated with a meander line antenna was fabricated and the experimental results agreed with simulations well.

An Optimized Circuit in Plastic Meander Line Antenna for 2.45 GHz Applications

Researchers seek to design electrically small planar antennas for RFID applications. Using multiparameter optimization, various meander line antennas were designed for the lowest resonant frequency and maximum radiation efficiencies for a fixed grid size. One such design for highest radiation efficiency was optimized for microwave frequencies by including an impedance matching structure. The antenna was printed with silver ink on a plexiglass substrate using the circuit in plastic (CiP) technique of embedded electrical components. The measured scattering parameter (S11) was −18.43 dB at resonance. The radiation efficiency of the antenna measured using simple and improved Wheeler cap method was 74.4/74.1%. The radiation pattern of electrically small CiP antenna was doughnut-shaped with main lobe magnitude of 0.453 dB and an angular width of 84.2° in elevation plane. The measured 10 dB fractional bandwidth of the antenna was 18.98%. The results are compared with silver/copper in air antennas optimized for achieving the highest radiation efficiency for a fixed grid size. Plastic antennas are viable at microwave frequencies.

The Impact of Reduced Conductivity on the Performance of Wire Antennas

Low cost methods of antenna production primarily aim to reduce the cost of metalization. This might lead to a reduction in conductivity. A systematic study on the impact of conductivity is presented. The efficiency, gain and bandwidth of cylindrical wire meander line, dipole, and Yagi-Uda antennas were compared for materials with conductivities in the range $\mathrm{10^3}$ to $\mathrm{10^9}$ S/m. In this range, the absorption efficiency of both the dipole and meander line changed little, however the conductivity significantly impacts on radiation efficiency and the absorption cross section of the antennas. The extinction cross section of the dipole and meander line antennas (antennas that Thevenin equivalent circuit is applicable) also vary with radiation efficiency. From the point of radiation efficiency, the dipole antenna performance is most robust under decreasing conductivity. Antennas studied in this study were fabricated with brass and graphite. Radiation efficiency of the antennas were measured by improved Wheeler cap (IWC) method. Measurement results showed a reasonable agreement with simulations. We also measured the extinction cross section of the six fabricated prototypes.

A Novel Metamaterial MIMO Antenna with Improved Isolation and Compact Size Based on LSRR Resonator

ABSTRACTA two-element multiple input–multiple output (MIMO) compact meander-line antenna with enhanced isolation performance using a novel metamaterial Labyrinth split-ring resonator (LSRR) is proposed. The reduction of mutual coupling between two antenna elements is obtained by embedding the proposed resonator between two radiating elements and achieving negative effective permeability. The proposed MIMO antenna system has been designed to operate at 2.4 GHz with 150 MHz bandwidth from 2.33 to 2.48 GHz (approximately 6.25% FBW) which is sufficient for wireless local area networks (WLAN) (2400–2484 MHz) communication. The designed MIMO antenna separated by 0.1 wavelengths has better than –45 dB coupling isolation, –55 dB correlation coefficient and 0.1 bps/Hz capacity loss at the operating frequency (2.4 GHz). Moreover, the proposed MIMO antenna system has the advantage of compactness as its size is only 2.43 × 4.29 cm2 (nearly 0.19 λ × 0.34 λ).

Folded meander line antenna for wireless M‐Bus in the VHF and UHF bands

The first dual-band printed monopole antenna for wireless M-Bus and M2M applications with operation in the VHF and lower UHF bands is presented. The antenna operates at 169 and 433 MHz. The miniaturisation of the proposed compact antenna is based on a double-sided meandering structure offering an easily controlled large frequency ratio. The antenna provides high total efficiency and gain in both bands. Measured and simulated results are reported.

Miniaturised wideband filtering antenna by employing CRLH‐TL and simplified feeding structure

A miniaturised three-order wideband filtering antenna by employing a composite right/left handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) and a simplified asymmetric coplanar strip feeding structure is presented. The CRLH-TL resonator resonates at zeroth-order mode and first-positive-order mode, and the meander-line antenna performs not only as a radiator but also as the last resonator of the corresponding bandpass filter. The proposed filtering antenna has four poles in the passband and two radiation nulls at the band edges. Compared with conventional antennas, the proposed filtering antenna shows flat gain responses and flat radiated powers within the passband, and displays good frequency skirt selectivity. Measurement results show that the filtering antenna can operate at from 4.03- to 7.11 GHz, has a 3.08 GHz bandwidth, a 2.5 dBi average gain in the broadside (+Z) direction and nearly 30 dBm average radiated power within the passband.

Mutual Coupling Reduction for Two Closely-Space Meander Line Antennas Using Metamaterial Substrate

Two closely spaced printed meander line antennas (MLAs) are developed by using metamaterial loading techniques with reduced mutual coupling. The antenna array built on the metamaterial substrate showed significant size reduction and less mutual coupling compared to similar arrays on conventional substrates. Demonstrated to have left-handed magnetic characteristics, the methodology uses elliptical split-ring resonators (E-SRRs) placed horizontally between the patch and the ground plane with a row of the same type between antenna elements. Measured return loss of the printed antenna with this technique is less than -10 dB from 5.1-5.9 GHz which covers the IEEE 802.11a (5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.47-5.725 GHz) American standard and HIPPER LAN/2 (5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.825 GHz) European standard. Also this antenna has an omnidirectional radiation pattern, high gain, and very good pattern stability over the operating band. It is shown to have great impact on the antenna performance enhancement in terms of high efficiency, low voltage standing wave ratio, good bandwidth and less mutual coupling between two antennas with a very close separation of about 0.073λ0. Experimental data show a reasonably good agreement between the simulation and measured results.

A Novel of Suspended Plate Compact Antenna Design for 2.4 GHz Applications

In wireless communication system, one of the unique challenges is the requirement for smaller and cheaper antenna design that becomes an important aspect in the deployment of wireless enabled products. To meet this challenge, we developed a simple, small, compact, low cost, and practical antenna targeted for 2.4 GHz (ISM Band) application. A detailed investigation on miniaturized microstrip planar new antenna design using a combination of proposed shorted patch and meandering method are presented. All design and simulations were done using Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS) Momentum. To ensure the precision, verification has been done, designs were fabricated, and measurements on return loss and impedance bandwidth were performed by using FieldFox RF Analyzer. In realizing the design, a study on the surface current is conducted by simulation in order to maintain the target resonance frequency, 2.45 GHz. The designs have resulted in 86.5% and 95.5% size reduction, in comparison with a conventional rectangular patch antenna which is used as benchmark in this work. The performance of the proposed antenna is proven to be better than other existing miniaturization techniques such as the meandered line antenna (MLA) at the same size. Further improvement on radiation characteristic is also achieved by implementing Suspended Plate Antenna (SPA) approach. From the significant size reduction obtained, the concept used in this work would be suitable for cost centric products requiring small sized wireless module.

Design of Meander Line Antenna for Operating Frequency of 2. 5 GHz

In this paper, the meander line antenna which operates at 2. 5 GHz was designed and analyzed. The tool named High Frequency Structure Simulator was used for design and simulate antenna. The antenna was designed on a Rogers Ultralam 1250 (tm) substrate with dielectric constant with relative permittivity of 2. 5 and dielectric loss tangent of 0. 0015 with a thickness of 2 mm. The performance of antenna was evaluated based on return loss, operational bandwidth, gain, VSWR and radiation pattern characteristics. During measurement return loss was measured by reading the S(1,1) port reflection constant parameter and it was found to be -20 dB.

Analysis of Effect of Conductor Line on Folded Type Meander-Line Antenna

In this paper folded type meander line antennas have been proposed. Performance of three different meander line antennas have been investigated, first one without conductor line and the other two with conductor line. First antenna is a triple band resonator while second antenna with conductor line becomes tetra band resonator and the last design is a dual band resonator but with higher return loss, -35 dB at 1.86 GHz. CST_STUDIO_2012 is being used for simulation. Far-field response, efficiency, gain, directivity and reflection coefficients have been chosen as factors for performance analysis and it has been successfully illustrated here that insertion of conductor line makes the antenna a better resonator and also improves the return loss. The proposed antennas in this paper work are able to operate in the LTE700, LTE/GSM1800, PCS/ UMTS/ WLAN/ LTE2400, L band (1-2 GHz) and S band (2-4 GHz).

A Novel RFID Tag Dipole Antenna

There is a problem in normal meander line antenna (MLA) that it is difficult to get performances of miniaturization, high efficiency and high inductance at the same time. A simple novel antenna design for this challenge is described. Two capacitive loads are added at the end of MLA to adjust the impendence. For saving material, holes are digged on the loads. Simulation by HFSS shows that, comparing with the regular MLA, the proposed antennas impedance enhances from 10-12j to 23+150j, and the maximum gain enhances from 1.31dB to 1.67dB, with a read range of 10.1m. Meanwhile the return loss at 915MHz is-34dB, with a wide-10dB bandwidth of 860 ~ 985 MHz.

An Investigation Into the Gustafsson Limit for Small Planar Antennas Using Optimization

The fundamental limit for small antennas provides a guide to the effectiveness of designs. Gustafsson et al, Yaghjian et al, and Mohammadpour-Aghdam et al independently deduced a variation of the Chu-Harrington limit for planar antennas in different forms. Using a multi-parameter optimisation technique based on the ant colony algorithm, planar, meander dipole antenna designs were selected on the basis of lowest resonant frequency and maximum radiation efficiency. The optimal antenna designs across the spectrum from 570 to 1750 MHz occupying an area of $56mm \times 25mm$ were compared with these limits calculated using the polarizability tensor. The results were compared with Sievenpiper's comparison of published planar antenna properties. The optimised antennas have greater than 90% polarizability compared to the containing conductive box in the range $0.3<ka<1.1$, so verifying the optimisation algorithm. The generalized absorption efficiency of the small meander line antennas is less than 50%, and results are the same for both PEC and copper designs.

BANDWIDTH ENHANCEMENT FOR LOW FREQUENCY MEANDER LINE ANTENNA

A simple and efiective method of bandwidth enhancement for the printed meander line antenna (MLA) is proposed. This approach is characterized by symmetrically printing two meandering sections on both sides of a dielectric substrate and connecting them via shorting pins at the bottom of meandering sections, which are connected to a capacitive stripe for impedance matching. The illustrative equivalent circuit and the corresponding principle of bandwidth enhancement of this double-layered MLA are presented. The measured results of these double-layered and single-layered MLAs manifest the validity of our design approach.

An Inductor Model for Analyzing the Performance of Printed Meander Line Antennas in Smart Structures

Meander line antenna has been considered desirable on flight vehicles to reduce drag and minimize aerodynamic disturbance; however, the antenna design and performance analysis have made mostly by trial-and-error. An inductor model by simulating the meander line sections as electrical inductors and the interconnecting radiation elements as a quasi-monopole antenna is developed to analyze the antenna performance. Experimental verifications of the printed meander line antennas embedded in composite laminated substrates show that the inductor model is effective to design and analyze. Of the 4 antennas tested, the discrepancy of resonant frequency in simulation and experiment is within 4.6%.

Chipless RFID tags fabricated by fully printing of metallic inks

This paper reviews recent advances in fully printed chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology with special concern on the discussion of coding theories, ID generating circuits, and tag antennas. Two types of chipless tags, one based on time-domain reflections and the other based on frequency domain signatures, are introduced. To enable a fully printed encoding circuit, linearly tapering technique is adopted in the first type of tags to cope with parasitic resistances of printed conductors. Both simulation and measurement efforts are made to verify the feasibility of the eight-bit fully printed paper-based tag. In the second type of tags, a group of LC tanks are exploited for encoding data in frequency domain with their resonances. The field measurements of the proof-of-concept of the tag produced by toner-transferring process and flexible printed circuit boards are provided to validate the practicability of the reconfigurable ten-bit chipless RFID tag. Furthermore, a novel RFID tag antenna design adopting linearly tapering technique is introduced. It shows 40 % save of conductive ink materials while keeping the same performance for conventional half-wave dipole antennas and meander line antennas. Finally, the paper discusses the future trends of chipless RFID tags in terms of fabrication cost, coding capacity, size, and reconfigurability. We see that, coupled with revolutionary design of low-cost tag antennas, fabrication/reconfiguration by printing techniques, moving to higher frequencies to shrink tag sizes and reduce manufacturing cost, as well as innovation in ID generating circuits to increase coding capacities, will be important research topics towards item-level tracking applications of chipless RFID tags.

Meander Line Antenna Design Using an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm

This paper presents the optimization of a meander line antenna finite-element model by means of an adaptive genetic algorithm (GA). To search for optimal antenna configurations, the present method employs a GA with an adaptive method that adjusts the characteristics of its selection, crossover, and mutation operators in order to maintain a diverse set of high-quality candidate solutions during its execution. It is shown that the present method can find an optimal solution faster than the conventional GA. Moreover, the fitness values of the optimal solutions obtained by the present method are better than those obtained by conventional GA.

An Overview on Properties, Parameter Consideration And Design of Meandering Antenna

Meander line antenna (MLA) is an electrically small antenna. Electrically small antennas pose several performance related issues such as narrow bandwidth, high VSWR, low gain and high cross polarization levels. In this paper overview on properties, parameter consideration and design of MLA is proposed. The proposed antenna is designed for USB based application. The antenna performance parameters are optimized to achieve reasonably wide impedance bandwidth, high gain, VSWR &lt; 2 and an Omni directional radiation pattern. Moreover, the current distribution and the effect of the ground plane size on the altered MLA are discussed in this paper.

Antenna Optimization Using Multiobjective Algorithms

This paper presents several applications of multiobjective optimization to antenna design, emphasizing the main general steps in this process. Specifications of antennas usually involve many conflicting objectives related to directivity, impedance matching, cross-polarization, and frequency range. These requirements induce multiobjective problems, which are formulated, solved, and analyzed here for three distinct antenna designs: a bowtie antenna for ground-penetrating radars, a reflector antenna for satellite broadcast systems, and a meander-line antenna for radio-frequency identification tags. Both stochastic and deterministic methods are considered in the analysis.

Two Compact, Wideband, and Decoupled Meander-Line Antennas Based on Metamaterial Concepts

A two-antenna system employing wideband metamaterial-inspired meander-line antennas with a maximum separation of λ0/5 is presented, and a very wide measured -10 dB return-loss bandwidth from 3.3 to 6 GHz is obtained. Orthogonal characteristic modes on the ground plane are excited, and the coupling between the two antennas is kept below -20 dB over the same frequency band.