Design of Ultra-Wideband Patch Antenna Based on Folding-Strip-Shaped Metamaterial Concepts

In this paper, a folding-strip-shaped compact ultra-wideband high gain microstrip patch antenna using planar metamaterial concepts has been proposed. The top patch of the antennas has been made up of folding strips while the bottom layer etched with periodically distributed cross strip-line gaps. The patterned patch and the ground layer have formed the left-handed characteristics which have great impact on the ordinary patch antenna. The proposed antennas have compact size 27.6x28.8 square millimetres and can be fabricated by Rogers 5880 substrate or low cost FR4 substrate. Results indicate that the impedance bandwidth (below10 dB return-loss) is from 3.7 GHz to more than 15.3 GHz with the simulated average gain more than 4.5 dB for Rogers 5880 substrate and 5.1 dB for FR4 substrate, respectively. Good agreement between the computation and experiment is achieved convincing that the proposed antennas have reliable applications for ultra-wideband wireless communications.