A printed paper-based inverted F-antenna (PIFA) for WLAN applications

This work shows the practicality of a paper substrate in wireless local area network (WLAN) applications for the first time. This substrate was used in designing, fabricating and testing a printed inverted F-antenna (PIFA) operating at 2.45GHz. Although paper substrates exhibit relatively high dielectric losses (tandelta ~ 0.07 at 2.45GHz), the maximum achievable gain of the fabricated antenna is +1.2 dBi and the total efficiency is ~ 82% at the resonant frequency. Furthermore, the simulation results of the return loss, as well as the radiation pattern of the antenna agree with the corresponding measured results.