Micromachined wearable/foldable super wideband (SWA) monopole antenna based on a flexible liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate toward imaging/sensing/health monitoring systems

In this paper, a wearable/foldable super wideband (SWB) monopole antenna on a flexible liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate is implemented using surface micromachining for imaging, sensing, radar and healthcare monitoring systems. The antenna consists of a coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed circular patch as a main radiator, a tapered transition portion between the patch and the CPW line, and corner-rounded ground planes, for broad bandwidth. The overall size of the antenna is 37.5 × 35.5 × 0.05 mm
³
. The fabricated SWB antenna is characterized in a frequency spectrum from 1 to 50 GHz. A measured ratio bandwidth of 11.9:1 (3.0 to 35.3 GHz or 169% bandwidth) has been obtained. The antenna has a monopole-like radiation pattern and a group delay of less than ±1 ns across all spectrum ranges. The measured results show good agreement with those of simulation.