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Micro strip Patch Antenna and its Applications: a Survey

Article  in  International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology · September 2011

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 ISSN:2229-6093
Indrasen Singh et al, Int. J. Comp. Tech. Appl., Vol 2 (5), 1595-1599

Micro strip Patch Antenna and its Applications: a Survey

Indrasen Singh, Dr. V.S. Tripathi

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad

[email protected]

Abstract

The study of microstrip patch antennas has made Microstrip antennas are characterized by a larger number
great progress in recent years. Compared with of physical parameters than are conventional microwave
conventional antennas, microstrip patch antennas have antennas. They can be designed to have many geometrical
more advantages and better prospects. They are lighter shapes and dimensions [2]. All microstrip antennas can
in weight, low volume, low cost, low profile, smaller in be divided into four basic catagories:
dimension and ease of fabrication and conformity.
Moreover, the microstrip patch antennas can provide
dual and circular polarizations, dual-frequency Microstrip Antennas
operation, frequency agility, broad band-width, feedline
flexibility, beam scanning omnidirectional patterning. In
this paper we discuss the microstrip antenna, types of
microstrip antenna, feeding techniques and application of Microstrip patch Microstrip Printed slot Microstrip Travelling-
microstrip patch antenna with their advantage and antennas dipoles antennas wave antennas
disadvantages over conventional microwave antennas.

Key Words: Microstrip Antenna (MSA), Microstrip patch

antenna (MPA), Feeding techniques.
2. Microstrip Patch Antenna
1. Introduction
A microstrip patch antenna (MPA) consists of a
Antenna is a transducer designed to transmit or conducting patch of any planar or nonplanar geometry on
receive electromagnetic waves. Microstrip antennas have one side of a dielectric substrate with a ground plane on
several advantages over conventional microwave antenna other side. It is a popular printed resonant antenna for
and therefore are widely used in many practical
narrow-band microwave wireless links that require semi-
applications. Microstrip antennas in its simplest
configuration are shown in Fig1. It consists of a radiating hemispherical coverage. Due to its planar configuration
patch on one side of dielectric substrate (Єr≤10), which and ease of integration with microstrip technology, the
has a ground plane on other side. microstrip patch antenna has been heavily studied and is
often used as elements for an array. A large number of
microstrip patch antennas have been studied to date. An
Radiating exhaustive list of the geometries along with their salient
Patch features is available [1]. The rectangular and circular
patches are the basic and most commonly used microstrip
Dielectric antennas. These patches are used for the simplest and the
Substrate Ground most demanding applications. Rectangular geometries are
plane separable in nature and their analysis is also simple. The
circular patch antenna has the advantage of their radiation
Fig 1: Microstrip antenna configuration

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pattern being symmetric. A rectangular microstrip patch III. Feeding Techniques

antenna in its simplest form is shown in Figure 2.
A feedline is used to excite to radiate by direct or
L indirect contact. There are many different techniques of
feeding and four most popular techniques are coaxial
Patch probe feed, microstrip line, aperture coupling and
proximity coupling [2].

Coaxial probe feeding is feeding method in which

that the inner conductor of the coaxial is attached to the
radiation patch of the antenna while the outer conductor is
W
connected to the ground plane. Advantages of coaxial
feeding is easy of fabrication, easy to match, low spurious
radiation and its disadvantages is narrow bandwidth,
t Difficult to model specially for thick substrate.

Patch antenna
h

Dielectric
Ground Plane Substrate
h
Substrate
Fig 2: Structure of rectangular microstrip patch antenna

The characteristics of microstrip patch antennas, Ground Plane Coaxial

Cable
microstrip sot antennas and printed dipole antennas are
compared in table 1. Fig 3: Coexial probe feed patch antenna

Sr. Characteristics Microstri Microstrip Printed Microstrip line feed is one of the easier methods to
No p Slot Diopole fabricate as it is a just conducting strip connecting to the
. Patch Antenna antenna patch and therefore can be consider as extension of patch.
Antenna
1. Profile Thin Thin Thin
It is simple to model and easy to match by controlling the
2. Fabrication Very Easy Easy inset position. However the disadvantage of this method
easy is that as substrate thickness increases, surface wave and
3. Polarization Both Both linear Linear spurious feed radiation increases which limit the
linear and and circular
circular
bandwidth.
4. Dual- Possible Possible Possible
Frequency
operation
5. Shape Any Mostly Rectangulat
L
flexibility shape rectangular ar and
λ/4
and circular triangular Microstrip
shapes
Antenna
6. Spurious Exists Exists Exists W
radiation
Microstrip
7. Bandwidth 2-50% 5-30% -30% Z0
line Z1

Єr

]
Substrate

Fig 4: Microstrip line feed patch antenna

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Aperture coupled feed consist of two different layers that need proper alignment. Also there is increase
substrate separated by a ground plane. On the bottom side in overall thickness of the antenna.
of lower substrate there is a microstrip feed line whose
energy is coupled to the patch through a slot on the In the wide range of antenna models there are different
ground plane separating two substrates. This arrangement structures of Microstrip antennas, but on the whole we
allows independent optimization of the feed mechanism have four basic parts in the antenna [6]:
and the radiating element. Normally top substrate uses a
thick low dielectric constant substrate while for the They are:
bottom substrate; it is the high dielectric substrate. The - The patch
ground plane, which is in the middle, isolates the feed
- Dielectric Substrate
from radiation element and minimizes interference of
spur ious radiation for pattern formation and polarization - Ground Plane
purity. Advantages is allows independent optimization of - Feed Line
feed mechanism element.
Patch Antenna
4. Applications
The Microstrip patch antennas are well known for
their performance and their robust design, fabrication and
Єr2 their extent usage. The advantages of this Microstrip
Ground patch antenna are to overcome their de-merits such as
plane Єr1 easy to design, light weight etc., the applications are in
with
the various fields such as in the medical applications,
aperture
satellites and of course even in the military systems just
Transmission Line like in the rockets, aircrafts missiles etc. the usage of the
Microstrip antennas are spreading widely in all the fields
Fig 5: Aperture coupled feed patch antenna
and areas and now they are booming in the commercial
aspects due to their low cost of the substrate material and
Proximity coupling has the largest bandwidth, has
the fabrication. It is also expected that due to the
low spurious radiation. However fabrication is difficult.
Length of feeding stub and width-to-length ratio of patch increasing usage of the patch antennas in the wide range
is used to control the match. Its coupling mechanism is this could take over the usage of the conventional
capacitive in nature. antennas for the maximum applications. Microstrip patch
antenna has several applications. Some of these
applications are discussed as below:

Patch Mobile and satellite communication application:

Mobile communication requires small, low-cost, low
profile antennas. Microstrip patch antenna meets all
requirements and various types of microstrip antennas
Antenna have been designed for use in mobile communication
dielectric
systems. In case of satellite communication circularly
polarized radiation patterns are required and can be
Microstrip realized using either square or circular patch with one or
feed line
two feed points.

Feed Global Positioning System applications: Nowadays

substrate
microstrip patch antennas with substrate having high
permittivity sintered material are used for global
positioning system. These antennas are circularly
polarized, very compact and quite expensive due to its
Fig 6: Proximity coupled microstrip patch antenna positioning. It is expected that millions of GPS receivers
will be used by the general population for land vehicles,
The major disadvantage of this feeding technique is
aircraft and maritime vessels to find there position
that it is difficult to fabricate because of the two dielectric
accurately

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): RFID uses in hyperthermia. The design of the particular radiator which
different areas like mobile communication, logistics, is to be used for this purpose should posses light weight,
manufacturing, transportation and health care [2]. RFID easy in handling and to be rugged. Only the patch radiator
system generally uses frequencies between 30 Hz and 5.8 fulfils these requirements. The initial designs for the
GHz depending on its applications. Basically RFID Microstrip radiator for inducing hyperthermia was based
system is a tag or transponder and a transceiver or reader. on the printed dipoles and annular rings which were
designed on S-band. And later on the design was based on
Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access the circular microstrip disk at L-band. There is a simple
(WiMax): The IEEE 802.16 standerd is known as operation that goes on with the instrument; two coupled
WiMax. It can reach upto 30 mile radius theoretically and Microstrip lines are separated with a flexible separation
data rate 70 Mbps. MPA generates three resonant modes which is used to measure the temperature inside the
at 2.7, 3.3 and 5.3 GHz and can, therefore, be used in human body. A flexible patch applicator can be seen in
WiMax compliant communication equipment. the figure below which operates at 430 MHz.

Radar Application: Radar can be used for detecting V. Advantage and Disadvantage
moving targets such as people and vehicles. It demands a
low profile, light weight antenna subsystem, the Microstrip patch antenna has several advantages over
microstrip antennas are an ideal choice. The fabrication conventional microwave antenna with one similarity of
technology based on photolithography enables the bulk frequency range from 100 MHz to 100 GHz same in both
production of microstrip antenna with repeatable type. The various advantage and disadvantage are given
performance at a lower cost in a lesser time frame as in table 2.
compared to the conventional antennas.
Sr. Advantage Disadvantage
Rectenna Application: Rectenna is a rectifying antenna, No.
a special type of antenna that is used to directly convert
1. Low weight Low efficiency
microwave energy into DC power. Rectenna is a
combination of four subsystems i.e. Antenna, ore 2. Low profile Low gain
rectification filter, rectifier, post rectification filter. in 3. Thin profile Large ohmic loss in the
rectenna application, it is necessary to design antennas feed structure of arrays
with very high directive characteristics to meet the
4. Required no cavity Low power handling
demands of long-distance links. Since the aim is to use backing capacity
the rectenna to transfer DC power through wireless links
for a long distance, this can only be accomplished by 5. Linear and Excitation of surface
circulation waves
increasing the electrical size of the antenna.
polarization
Telemedicine Application: In telemedicine application
6. Capable of dual and Polarization pur ity is
antenna is operating at 2.45 GHz. Wearable microstrip triple frequency difficult to achieve
antenna is suitable for Wireless Body Area Network operation
(WBAN). The proposed antenna achieved a higher gain
and front to back ratio compared to the other antennas, in 7. Feed lines and Complex feed structures
addition to the semi directional radiation pattern which is matching network require high performance
can be fabricated arrays
preferred over the omni-directional pattern to overcome
simultaneously
unnecessary radiation to the user's body and satisfies the
requirement for on-body and off-body applications. A
antenna having gain of 6.7 dB and a F/B ratio of 11.7 dB
and resonates at 2.45GHz is suitable for telemedicine
applications.

Medicinal applications of patch: It is found that in

the treatment of malignant tumors the microwave energy
is said to be the most effective way of inducing

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Indrasen Singh et al, Int. J. Comp. Tech. Appl., Vol 2 (5), 1595-1599

5. Conclusion

A theoretical survey on microstrip patch antenna is

presented in this paper. Some effect of disadvantages can
be minimized. Lower gain and low power handling
capacity can be overcome through an array configuration.
Some factors are involved in the selection of feeding
technique. Particular microstrip patch antenna can be
designed for each application and different merits are
compared with conventional microwave antenna.

12. References
[1] James j., and P.S. Hall (Eds), Handbook of microstrip
antenna, Peter Peregrinus, London, UK, 1989.

[2] Ramesh Garg, Prakash Bartia, Inder Bahl, Apisak

Ittipiboon, ‘’Microstrip Antenna Design Handbook’’,
2001, pp 1‐68, 253‐316 Artech House Inc. Norwood,
MA.

[3] Wentworth M. Stuart (2005), ‘’Fundamentals of

Electromagnetic with Engineering Applications’’, pp
442‐445, John Wiley & Sons, NJ, USA.

[4] J. D. Kraus, R. J. Marhefka, “Antenna for all

applications” 3rd Ed., McGraw- Hill, 2002.

[5] Robert A. Sainati, CAD of Microstrip Antennas for

Wireless Applications, Artech House Inc, Norwood, MA,
1996.

[6] Y T Lo and S W Lee, editors, ‘’Antenna

Handbook Theory, Applications & Design’’, Van
Nostrand Rein Company, NY, 1988.

[7] C.A. Balanis, Antenna theory: analysis and

design, 2nd ed., John Willey and & Son, Inc., 1997.

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