Design of a novel compact broadband patch antenna using binary PSO

In this article, a C-Band broadband patch antenna is designed. The binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) combining with IE3D software is adopted to broaden the bandwidth of the patch antenna automatically. Characteristics of the antenna are calculated using the well-known Zeland IE3D software package while the bandwidth characteristic of the antenna is optimized using BPSO technique. The comparison results show that the 3.2% impedance bandwidth (4.63-4.78 GHz) of the patch antenna is upgrade to 10.4% (4.47-4.96 GHz) through the BPSO-IE3D method. The antenna gain is stable and the radiation patterns are similar in configuration over the whole operating frequencies to that of a conventional patch antenna. A prototype of the optimized antenna has been fabricated and important antenna parameters such as reflection coefficient (S11) parameter, gains and radiation patterns are measured using Network Analyzer and antenna test-bench. The measured values of the antenna parameters are found to match well with that of the simulated results, all of which illustrate that the method is valid and the antenna can operate well. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett, 54:434-438, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26552