Planar antennas on Integrated Passive Device technology for biomedical applications

In this paper, we present the design of electrically small antennas for biomedical application at 2.4 GHz. Performance of two different antennas built using the Integrated Passive Devices (IPD) technology from STMicroelectronics is investigated. Two monopoles miniaturized with the meandered technique are studied. Their quality factor Q
_z
is calculated from their input impedance and compared with the quality factor limits for planar antennas given by Gustafsson. Therefore, we determine which configuration offers the best trade-off between radiation efficiency and quality factor Q
_z
.