IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

6, 2007

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The Design of Miniaturized Printed Wire Antennas Using Double-Layer Periodic Metallization
Chengzhi Zhou, Student Member, IEEE, and H. Y. David Yang, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractThe design of miniaturized printed wire antennas using multilayer vias loaded periodic metallization is presented. The proposed structure is evolved from a periodic slow-wave transmission line, where each unit cell is made of a patch and two loops spread over two metal layers connected in series through vias. A section of the periodic metallization is used as a quarter-wave monopole antenna protruded over a truncated ground plane and fed by a microstrip line. The design prototype at 2.4 GHz band shows that it is possible to obtain 24% 10 dB bandwidth with 80% efciency at an antenna length of 12 mm long without tuning inductors, more than a 50% reduction from a normal printed straight monopole. Index TermsElectromagnetic band-gap, monopole antennas, slow wave structures, small antennas, wideband.

I. INTRODUCTION

IRELESS communication technologies and applications have shown tremendous growth lately and continuously strive for better performance, lower power consumption, and smaller device size. Antennas are usually the largest component in radio-frequency (RF) front-end circuits and their miniaturization on a printed circuit board (PCB) has attracted signicant research interest lately [1][4]. An effective antenna is a quarter-wave monopole collapsing on the PCB. Without conductor on the back to form a resonator, it maintains a low-Q feature of a suspended antenna and is broadband in nature. In many portable wireless applications where the complete communication system is built on a small circuit board, it usually allows very small area for an antenna. It is possible to reduce the antenna area and decrease impedance bandwidth by using a smaller (capacitive) antenna together with a tuning inductor, such as the inverted F antennas. In any case, the characteristics of an antenna are mostly determined by its electrical length. High dielectric-constant materials could be useful in reducing antenna physical length. Recently, the use of ultraslow wave transmission line structures to reduce the size of passive components has received noticeable attention. The use of periodic inductive or capacitive loadings on a transmission line either right- or left-handed could tailor the - diagram and results in an ultralarge phase constant or an ultrasmall transmission-

line wave length. Various miniaturized microwave passive components have been reported for both antenna and circuit applications, based on the slow-wave periodic transmission line [5][8]. A common feature of these passives components is the use of ground plane to provide a current return path, and in many cases, the ground plane is patterned to provide addition loadings. In this letter, a new ultraslow-wave transmission line in a two-layer dielectric structure is proposed. The unit cell is made of a small patch and two inductive loops spread over two metal layers connected through vias. The transmission line is still right-handed (low-pass). The idea is to enhance the series inductance and shunt capacitance per unit length utilizing the vertical direction. Although the proposed slow-wave transmission line can be used for circuit applications with greater than four-time size reduction, it is intended for printed monopole antenna applications by removing the lower dielectric layer and the metal ground plane. The resulting antenna structure is basically a compressed, twisted, and fragmented wire spread over multiple layers with vias interconnects to minimize the component planar area. The characteristics of the proposed slow-wave transmission line structure are discussed in Section II. The design to maximize the slow-wave factor with given dielectric layers and planar area, is based on Zeland IE3D full-wave electromagnetic simulations. An ultra small monopole antenna is designed based on the slow-wave transmission line. Its impedance bandwidth, radiation efciency, and gain are characterized. Further improvement for size reduction without losing much bandwidth is also addressed. II. CHARACTERIZATION OF A TWO-LAYER SLOW-WAVE STRUCTURE A novel double layer slow-wave transmission line is characterized, fabricated, and tested. The conguration and its equivalent circuit of a unit cell are given in Fig. 1. The dielectric layers are FR4 epoxy with a dielectric constant of 4.2. The top layer thickness is 0.762 mm (30 mil) and the bottom layer thickness is 0.356 mm (14 mil). The parameters of the transmission line mm, mm, mm, and mm. are: In the unit cell, double-layer loops are used in the left side to increase the series inductance, and a rectangular patch on the right is used to enhance the shunting capacitance between the transmission line and the ground plane. The equivalent circuit is shown in Fig. 1(c). The dispersion characteristics of this transmission line can be determined by the BlochFloquet theorem [9]. Hence, the

Manuscript received September 8, 2006; revised December 5, 2006. This work was supported in part by U.S. Department of Defense under MURI Grant F49620-01-1-0436 and National Science Foundation under STTR Grant OII0539198. The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607 USA (e-mail: czhou2@uic. edu; [email protected]). Color versions of Figs. 18 are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2006.890748

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 6, 2007

Fig. 2. S11 for 5-unit cell double-layer EBG transmission line. Fig. 1. Unit cell of a double-layer slow-wave line and its equivalent circuit. (a) Top view, (b) side view, and (c) equivalent circuit.

phase constant and the characteristic impedance for the fundamental mode (low-pass) are found from the expressions

(1) and (2) where and are the inductance and capacitance on each unit cell. According to (1) and (2), in order to increase the slow wave factor (SWF) and maintain similar characteristic impedance, series L and shunting C should both increase, while keeping the ratio as a constant. The use of the double-layer loops and a metal patch serves this purpose. Figs. 2 and 3 show the two-port scattering parameters of this multilayer transmission line with 5 unit cells. The simulations are rst performed by Zeland IE3D, a moment (MOM) based full-wave solver. The inductance and are extracted by comparing the cascade of the capacitance ve unit cell circuits in Fig. 1(c) and the IE3D simulation. The extracted inductance and capacitance have the value of nH, pF on a unit cell (2 mm). The results from direct IE3D simulations, the - equivalent circuit model, and the measurement are shown in Figs. 2 and 3 for comparison. The results demonstrate a low-pass feature of the transmission line and the accuracy of the circuit model in the pass band. The cutoff frequencies obtained from the three approaches are about the same. Note that the cutoff frequency . The cut-off frecan also be predicted by setting (1) to 1 or quency is about 6.39 GHz for the present case and is determined from (3) Normalized propagation constant (or slow wave factor) versus frequency is shown in Fig. 4. The equivalent circuit in (1). Scattering matrix method uses the extracted and

Fig. 3. S21 for 5-unit cell double-layer EBG transmission line.

method uses the two-port S-matrix IE3D simulation shown in Figs. 2 and 3 and the formulas given in [5] to nd the propagation characteristics. Comparison shows a good agreement. The comparison between the new slow-wave structure and a normal microstrip is also shown. It is observed that the SWF has a value of 7.64 from the measurement and agrees well with the two different simulation results. The SWF is more than four times larger than that of a normal 50 ohm microstrip line on an FR4 substrate, which is approximately 1.78. This large SWF could reduce signicantly the overall size of RF passive components. III. ULTRASMALL MONOPOLE DESIGNS A. Monopole Designs Although the double loops-series patch transmission line described in Section II can be used for many circuit applications, this letter addresses its application to the printed antennas for portable wireless devices. The design problem under consideration is a quarter-wave monopole extended from a microstrip protruded over a truncated ground plane similar to an inverted F antenna but without inductive tuning. The structure is shown in Fig. 5(a). Due to the ground plane removal, the structure is no

ZHOU AND YANG: DESIGN OF MINIATURIZED PRINTED WIRE ANTENNAS

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Fig. 4. Slow wave factor of a double-loop-patch transmission line before the cutoff frequency.

Fig. 6. Measured and simulated return loss of a double loops-patch monopole antenna.

Fig. 5. (a) Double loops-patch monopole and (b) a normall strip monopole.

longer a transmission line and there is a signicant capacitance reduction. For comparison, a normal printed wire monopole is also shown Fig. 5(b). A 0.3-mm-long trapezoid shaped strip is used for the transition from the feed-line to the loop-patch monopole. The monopole is a cascaded of six unit cells. The structure is basically a single-layer substrate (double metal layers) and it can be extended to multiple layers with multiple loops. The two-turn loops now spread over the top and the bottom metal layers and the small patch is on the bottom metal layer with interconnecting vias. Anisoft High Frequency Structure Simulator HFSS 3D EM solver is used here for the antenna design that involve a nite ground and a nite substrate. The EM simulations nd the antenna return loss, far eld radiation patterns, and radiation efciency. The design is intended for the 2.4 GHz ISM band, although the approach is general enough applicable to other frequency bands with a proper dimension scaling. As a bench mark for comparison, a straight microstrip monopole is also simulated. Both the double loop-patch monopole and a normal microstrip monopole are designed at resonant frequency (minimum return loss) at 2.55 GHz and both have a similar 10 dB impedance bandwidth of 23.9% (610 MHz) (the Q factors are 3.40 and 3.35, respectively, for the reduced-size and normal monopoles). But the double loop-patch monopole is much shorter (12 mm as compared to 25 mm) and is about 48% of

the straight normal monopole. It is noticed that for the FR4 substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.2, the quarter wave length of a microstrip line for 2.55 GHz is around 17 mm, which is shorter than 25 mm of a resonant (quarter-wave) straight monopole. This is due to the fact that the truncation of the ground plane underneath the monopole decreases the intrinsic shunting capacitance of the microstrip signicantly. As a result, the current-wave along the monopole has a larger wavelength (more closer to the air wavelength) than that of an open-circuit microstrip line. Similar argument also holds for the double loops-patch monopole. Therefore, a factor of 4 in wavelength reduction (SWF) observed in Section II corresponds to only about a factor of 2 (25 mm to 12 mm) in monopole size reduction. The prototypes of the proposed monopole antennas are fabricated on a single-layer FR-4 material with a printed circuit technology. The antenna impedance is measured with a GSG probe on a probe station connected to a HP 8510 C network analyzer. Fig. 6 shows the comparison between measured and simulated results. Very good agreement is found. In wireless applications at the 2.4 GHz ISM band such as bluetooth or wireless local access network (WLAN), the required band usage is less than 100 MHz. It is desirable for antenna to have a much wider bandwidth to accommodate the loadings from surrounding environment. The 2024% bandwidth of the self-resonant monopole antenna designed here is close to the optimized value for the pertinent structure. Practically, one can reduce the length of the monopole to make it more capacitive and add a tuning inductive arm as in the case of an inverted F. The straight monopole can also be bended in an L-shape. The bandwidth will reduce as the monopole length decreases from its quarter-wave length. In any case, the double loops-patch monopole proposed here could easily reduce more than 50% of the PCB wire antennas commonly used in portable wireless systems without losing the bandwidth. The monopole designed in this work uses only one dielectric layer (two loops). It is conceivable that using multiple layers (more loops) could further increase SWF and reduce antenna length at perhaps a higher fabrication cost.

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 6, 2007

Fig. 7. Measured radiation patterns of an ultra small (loops-patch) monopole at 2.5 GHz. (a) E-Plane and (b) H-Plane. Fig. 8. Simulated radiation efciency of the two monopoles.

B. Finite Ground Issue for Impedance Matching It is noted that the monopole trace extending over the backside ground plane determines the antenna impedance characteristics. In general, the truncated ground plane plays a useful role in impedance matching. Furthermore, the circuit boards for most PCB antennas in portable wireless systems are small and the size of the ground plane is often less than a wavelength. Therefore, the area of the ground plane and the relative location of the monopole to the ground edge will affect the antenna impedance. Current distributions obtained from EM simulations show that there is a high-density current crowded on the ground edge under the monopole. This implies the whole circuit board should be treated as one antenna structure. The ground patch can be optimized to obtain the widest bandwidth. C. Radiation Patterns The measured radiation patterns of the double loops-patch monopole are shown in Fig. 7. The antenna measurements are performed inside an anechoic chamber. Fig. 7 shows the E and H Plane plots for copolarized and cross-polarized radiation patterns of the double loops-patch monopole. The H-plane is transverse to the monopole direction, while the E-plane is in the plane of the monopole. Fairly linearly polarized and donut shaped patterns (nulls in the direction of the monopole) are observed. Signicant cross-polarization is observed. This is due to the fact that the monopole is twisted with loops and a small patch, resembling a magnetic and an electric dipole. D. Radiation Efciency Radiation efciency is dened as the ratio of radiated power to input power. The radiation efciencies based on HFSS simulations for the proposed monopole and the normal microstrip monopole are shown in Fig. 8. In general, the conductor and material losses increase with frequency. But the radiation resistance also increases with frequency. It is observed from Fig. 8 that within the in-band frequencies (around 2.55 GHz), the normal microstrip monopole has about 5% higher efciency. The efciency of the proposed double loops-patch monopoles is about 85% at 2.4 GHz ISM band. IV. CONCLUSION This letter investigated the use of two-layer periodic metallization in portable wireless antenna designs. The monopole antenna is consisted a section of periodic arrays of double loopspatch in series spread over the top and bottom substrate surfaces. This structure is evolved from a multi-layer planar periodic slow-wave transmission-line. The corresponding slowwave line is characterized. It was found that a slow wave factor of 7.64 can be achieved with a two dielectric-layer board. Antenna prototypes showed a 52% size reduction from a straight printed monopole, while maintaining 23.9% bandwidth centered at 2.55 GHz. The radiation measurements show a donut-shaped and linear-polarized pattern with gain similarly to a monopole antenna. More than 80% in-band radiation efciency was found from simulations. Further monopole size reduction is possible with additional metal layers and loops and a larger series patch. REFERENCES
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