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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

Bandwidth-Enhanced Electrically Small Printed Folded Dipoles


Yanyan Zhang and H. Y. David Yang, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractThis letter presents a wire folding scheme to enhance the bandwidth of an electrically small resonant microstrip antenna. As an example, meandered two-wire slow-wave lines spread on both sides of a dielectric slab short-circuited at both ends form a vertically folded printed dipole. It is found that the radiation resistance increases by about a factor of 4, and the energy storage increases by about a factor of 2, using a folded dipole. It is shown through both measurement and simulation that the -factor is reduced by about 50% through antenna folding. A 0 14 -long folded dipole resonant at 2.43 GHz shows a bandwidth of about 4.8%. The proposed folding method facilitates planar antenna miniaturization with sufcient bandwidth. Index TermsElectrically small antenna (ESA), folded dipole, microstrip, slow-wave structures.

I. INTRODUCTION N WIRELESS communications where the entire system may reside on a small circuit board, the area reserved for an integrated antenna is often much smaller than a wavelength. There is signicant renewed interest recently in electrically small antennas [1][4]. A fundamental issue that limits antenna size reduction is the impedance bandwidth (or the quality factor ). In addition to the necessary gain, an antenna should be resonant with sufcient surface for radiation. Common integrated antennas in wireless systems are suspended monopoles on a substrate surface with a vicinity ground to provide a current return path [5]. In many systems, such as RFID, a dipole antenna (two symmetric monopoles) that is self-balanced with a differential input is preferred [6]. Resonant wire antenna size can be much reduced by winding the traces into a multilayer structure within the content of metamaterials. An electrically small antenna (ESA) can be made from a section of metamaterial slow-wave transmission line [7]. Although the miniaturized antennas (or ESAs) are self-resonant, a common problem is insufcient radiation resistance due to the small antenna area that leads to a large -factor. Antenna bandwidth is still limited by the overall antenna volume. An approach to improve the -factor is to distribute effectively radiating currents into two or three dimensions with arm currents adding up in phase. Folded dipoles or monopoles provide such a solution. Folded dipoles had been known for many
Manuscript received March 10, 2010; accepted March 15, 2010. Date of publication March 29, 2010; date of current version April 08, 2010. The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607 USA ( e-mail: yzhang40@uic.edu; hyang@ece.uic.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2010.2046875

decades as an approach to increase the dipole impedance by a factor of 4 for impedance matching purpose [8]. Lately, it was proposed to enhance the radiation resistance of a meandered folded monopole in free space above a ground plane [9], [10]. It was demonstrated that the radiation resistance, bandwidth, and efciency of a meandered monopole increase substantially by antenna folding. A nonplanar folded left-handed metamaterial monopole was also designed and tested recently [11]. The improvement in efciency and bandwidth over an unfolded counterpart is also observed. This letter presents the investigation of a vertically folded meandered dipole on a circuit board. An aim is to demonstrate its dramatic bandwidth enhancement capability. For a vertically folded dipole (in contrast to a coplanar folding), the two radiation arms are at the top and bottom dielectric surfaces, respectively, connected through vias at the end of the dipoles. It basically maintains the same antenna area of a printed dipole since the clearance is necessary on its opposite side. A meandered folded dipole was proposed earlier [12], which demonstrated how to reduce antenna size by meandering and to obtain sufcient radiation resistance by folding. This letter is a step further that addresses the reduction in stored energy such that the bandwidth is enhanced signicantly. The way to accomplish it is to space the folded dipole with sufcient distance so that the two arms in a folded dipole are more or less decoupled. Both simulated results using HFSS software and measured data are presented. The -reduction (and bandwidth enhancement) through the use of antenna folding is also quantied. II. PRINTED MEANDERED DIPOLE FOR SIZE REDUCTION Fundamental issues of an ESA are high (small bandwidth) and impedance tuning. A quarter- or a half-wavelength slowwave line, which corresponds to a miniaturized resonant antenna, provides a size reduction solution. General antenna bandwidth is limited as the antenna volume is small. As the antenna effective length is smaller, in order to maintain resonance, longer traces are needed. For example, a meander dipole is in effect a much longer dipole compressed in a smaller length. As a result, ohmic loss is higher (longer current path) and radiation resistance is smaller (a smaller effective radiation length) than those of a straight resonant dipole. As an example to demonstrate this common problem for an electrically small integrated antenna, the cases of meanand dered microstrip dipoles on a 3.17-mm FR-4 ( ) dielectric surface are considered. For comparison, the cases of four-cell, six-cell, and eight-cell meandered dipole (strip width 0.2 mm) are investigated. All three cases are designed resonant at 2.2 GHz with height 4.65 mm,

1536-1225/$26.00 2010 IEEE

ZHANG AND YANG: BANDWIDTH-ENHANCED ELECTRICALLY SMALL PRINTED FOLDED DIPOLES

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Fig. 1. A six-unit-cell meandered dipole on a dielectric surface. Strip width is 0.2 mm.

Fig. 2. A meandered folded dipole with the second arm on the board backside connecting through vias.

TABLE I ANTENNA CHARACTERISTICS OF A PRINTED MEANDERED DIPOLE

III. FOLDED MEANDERED DIPOLE FOR

REDUCTION

A folded dipole is basically a two-wire transmission line resonator with a short at both ends. The feed is at the center opening of one of the wires. There are two modes of operation, the even mode (the dipole mode) and the odd mode (transmission line mode). The case considered here is a symmetrically folded dipole. According to the theory of a folded dipole [8], antenna is given as input impedance (2) and the length varies depending on the unit cell length. The top view of a six-cell meandered dipole (three unit cells on each side of the dipole) is shown in Fig. 1. The total trace length for the six-cell case is about 72 mm, while a straight dipole is about 43.5 mm, both resonant at 2.2 GHz. The input impedance, radiation efciency, and radiation patterns are obtained from HFSS simulation. The -factor including the material and metal losses are derived from the dipole input impedance [13] as is the input impedance for half of where and the shorted slow-wave lines (odd mode phase constant is the unfolded dipole input impedance impedance ) and when the other half of the two-wires is removed. In the freespace case, when the lines are half-wavelength long, both the dipole mode and the (TEM) transmission line mode resonate , and the folded dipole radiation resimultaneously sistance is four times of an unfolded dipole. A careful look of the folded dipole reveals that the antenna mode is basically for a one-wavelength dipole with the outer half of each monopole arm bent backward so that the radiating currents in the rst and the second half of the arm add in phase and in effect increase the radiated power by a factor of 4 as compared to a half-wavelength dipole. As an example, a meandered dipole and its folded version are designed and fabricated on a 3.17-mm FR-4 slab. The dipole is the same as the one shown in Fig. 1. Both folded and nonfolded antennas are 16.3 mm long and 4.65 mm wide. The traces are 0.2 mm wide. For the folded dipole case, the second arm is on the backside of the slab. The photograph of the prototype including the feed line is shown in Fig. 2, where the circle marks are the locations of the vias. The comparison of a folded and nonfolded meandered dipole based on simulation without the feed line is shown in Table II. As observed in Table I, the meandered dipole (nonfolded) is designed resonant at 2.2 GHz, and it is far from resonant at 2.43 GHz, as shown in Table II. However, when two such dipoles are folded together, the resonant frequency shifts to 2.43 GHz. This is due to the fact that the wavelengths of the antenna (even) and transmission line (odd) modes are quite different in integrated circuits. Nevertheless the radiation resistance increases by almost four times [as predicted in (2)], and the radiation (excluding losses) reduces by about half, while the stored energy is about double, with a folded dipole. The stored energy increase (two times) is the result of two identical

(1) The radiation (including surface wave power) is the total divided by the radiation efciency. At the same resonant frequency 2.2 GHz, the dipole is meandered to reduce its physical length. The smaller the unit cell size ( ) is the smaller resonant dipole effective length is and more unit cells are needed. Table I shows that as the dipole resonant length reduces, both the radiation resistance (not including resistance due to losses) and efciency decrease due to the longer length trace length (ohmic loss) and less effective radiating area. At the same time, the radiation increases substantially. Overall antenna performance becomes worse as the resonant dipole length decreases. The small antenna is not an effective radiator, although it is self-tuned to resonance. A meandered two-wire line is an example of a slow-wave transmission line, which is basically a transmission line periodically loaded with distributed inductors or capacitors. The transmission line wavelength could be much smaller than a TEM line [14]. In spite of the fact that a meandered line is not an ideal slow-wave line for space, losses, and -factor consideration, the observation in Table I pertains to an electrically small antenna in general.

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

TABLE II COMPARISON BASED ON HFSS SIMULATION OF A FOLDED AND A NONFOLDED PRINTED MEANDERED DIPOLE

TABLE III COMPARISON BASED ON MEASUREMENT (INCLUDING FEED LINE) OF A FOLDED AND A NONFOLDED PRINTED MEANDERED DIPOLE

Fig. 3. Reection coefcients of the meandered folded dipole shown in Fig. 2.

dipoles with the same current (even mode) with sufcient distance in between. The total dipole line length (end to end) is about 14% of a free-space wavelength at 2.43 GHz. The feed line of the prototype is tapered coplanar strips. The slot width is 0.2 mm, the same as the feed gap of the dipole. The strip width of the slot line is tapered from 0.76 mm at the dipole to 4.3 mm at the board edge for an SMA connector. This feed line is necessary to push the dipole away from the board edge. The simulation and measurement comparison of the folded dipole and the nonfolded dipole including the feed lines are shown in Table III. The length of the feed line from the dipole to the SMA is about half of the guided wavelength. With the loss of the coplanar lines included, the input impedance at SMA is slightly different from the input impedance at the dipole input. Table III shows good agreement between simulation and measurement in -factor (or BW). Note that -factor is about half using the folded dipole as predicted. For comparison purposes, the dipole results (nonfolded) are shown for both 2.2 and 2.43 GHz. Interestingly, the resonant resistance of the folded dipole is about four times of a dipole resonant resistance, although compared at different frequencies (their resonant frequencies). This example demonstrates clearly that the use of antenna folding could enhance signicant (almost double) bandwidth of an electrically small antenna. The only possible downside is the use of the board area on the opposite side of the antenna surface. Simulated and measured reection coefcients versus frequency for the folded dipole shown in Fig. 2 are shown in Fig. 3. As seen from the return loss curves, the folded dipole without the feeding line (based on simulation) and loss has 10 dB impedance bandwidth of 100 MHz from 2.38 to 2.48 GHz at the center frequency of 2.43 GHz. Adding the feeding line and losses widens the 10-dB band by about 10 MHz, shifting slightly toward a lower frequency range. Return loss

Fig. 4. Bandwidth comparison of a meandered dipole and its folded version based on full-wave and circuit simulations, both tuned to 50
at 2.43 GHz.

measurement and simulation agree very well. The impedance according to [13] as bandwidth is related to (3) where is the voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR). and For 10 dB impedance bandwidth (fromTable III), the bandwidth is about 4.8%, while the measurement shown in Fig. 3 shows a bandwidth about 4.9% (120 MHz divided by 2.43 GHz). In contrast, for a meandered dipole of the same length (no folding), the bandwidth is only about 2.7% (simulation) and 2.4% (measurement) based on (2). Direct bandwidth comparison is not feasible, as the two antennas resonate at different frequencies with different resonant resistance. A better approach is to assume lossless LC impedance matching to 50 at 2.43 GHz for the two antennas. The 10-dB bandwidth comparison based on the reection coefcient is shown in Fig. 4. The results show 70 MHz in-band (2.9%) for a dipole and 120 MHz in-band (4.8%) for a folded dipole. The use of antenna folding has a clear advantage of enhancing the bandwidth within the same board volume, although

ZHANG AND YANG: BANDWIDTH-ENHANCED ELECTRICALLY SMALL PRINTED FOLDED DIPOLES

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the actual antenna area is twice as much counting the dielectric surface area on both sides. Antenna folding offers a bandwidth enhancement method by effectively utilizing the circuit board area and volume and could be useful in personal wireless systems where the antenna area is of the primary concern. Antenna gain calculations and measurements show that the folded dipole and the unfolded dipole carry similar radiation characteristics. When tuned at resonance, both have about 2 dB maximum gain, and the patterns are similar to a dipole antenna pattern (a donut shape).

cept could also be applied to folded monopoles, where half of the dipole is replaced by a ground plane. REFERENCES
[1] S. R. Best, The radiation properties of electrically small folded spherical helix antenna, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 953960, Apr. 2004. [2] S. R. Best, A discussion on the quality factor of impedance matched electrically small wire antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 502508, Jan. 2005. [3] A. R. Lopez, Fundamental limitation of small antennas: Validation of Wheelers formulas, IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 2835, Aug. 2006. [4] H. Y. D. Yang, Miniaturized printed wire antenna for wireless communications, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 4, pp. 358361, 2005. [5] C. Soras, M. karaboikis, G. Tsachtsiris, and V. makios, Analysis and design of an inverted-F antenna printed on a PCMCIA card for the 2.4 GHz ISM band, IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 3744, Feb. 2002. [6] K. V. S. Rao, P. V. Nikitin, and S. F. Lam, Antenna design for UHF RFID tags: A review and a practical application, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 12, pp. 38703876, Dec. 2005. [7] G. V. Eleftheriades and M. A. Antoniades, Antenna applications of negative-refractive-index transmission-line (NRI-TL) structures, IEE Microw., Antennas Propag., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1222, Feb. 2007, Special Issue on Metamaterials. [8] C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, 3rd ed. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 2005, pp. 515518. [9] S. R. Best, The performance properties of electrically small resonant multi-arm folded wire antennas, IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1327, Aug. 2005. [10] A. Harmouch and H. A. Al Shelkh, Miniaturization of the folded dipole antenna, IEEE Antennas Propag. Mag., vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 117123, Feb. 2009. [11] M. A. Antoniades and G. V. Eleftheriades, A folded monopole for electrically small NRI-TL metamaterial antennas, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 7, pp. 42528, 2008. [12] Y. Zhang and H. Y. D. Yang, Miniaturized printed folded dipole antennas, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Symp., 2009, DOI: 10/1109/ APS.2009.5171839. [13] A. D. Yaghjian and S. R. Best, Impedance, bandwidth, and Q of antennas, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 12981323, Apr. 2005. [14] D. M. Pozar, Microwave Engineering, 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005, pp. 371375.

IV. CONCLUSION Previously, it had been shown that the use of a meandered folded dipole could reduce antenna size while maintaining sufcient radiation resistance. Normally, reducing antenna length also reduces the radiation resistance in an ESA. This letter addressed the reduction in stored energy such that the -factor can be reduced by two times, resulting in signicant bandwidth enhancement. The way to accomplish it is to space the folded dipole sufciently (arm distance) so that the two arms in a folded dipole are more or less decoupled. It was found that by using two identical meandered dipoles and folding them together with proper spacing, the folded meandered dipole has half of the -factor. The meandered dipole is a special case of slow-wave lines for size reduction of a resonant antenna within the content of metamaterial slow-wave structures. It was found that folding (short-circuit both ends) two electrically small resonant dipole could enhance the bandwidth as much as 70%100%. It was also shown that this bandwidth enhancement is coming from increasing radiation power by almost four times and stored energy by almost two times, as is evident from the input impedance information. The proposed scheme can be extended to multiple folded antennas for further bandwidth enhancement. The con-

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