Design of UWB antenna using reconfigurable optical router

In this paper, a novel frequency reconfigurable microstrip antenna is presented. The proposed antenna has four photoconductive switches. These switches are mounted across two rectangular shape slots etched on the radiation patch. According to the incident light, the physical properties of these switches can be changed from an insulator state (OFF state) to a near-conducting state (ON state). The incident light is then coupled to the photoconductive switches using a reconfigurable optical router. The design in this paper yields an ultra-wideband that extends from 2.83 to 13.0 GHz with switchable single notched bands of 3.3-3.9 and 4.8-5.8 GHz for WiMAX and WLAN applications, respectively. Further, another two bands of 3.3-3.9 and 5.6-6.1 GHz can be eliminated from the whole frequency band. The suggested design is fabricated using photolithographic technique and the measured results have very good agreement with the simulated ones.