Low-cost wideband antenna on paper substrate

In this paper, a wide-band monopole antenna structure printed on 104-um E4D paper, a thin, flexible and low cost substrate, has been proposed. For the design process, E4D paper was characterized to obtain its electromagnetic properties by the cavity perturbation method with a cylindrical cavity. Then the antenna was designed and optimized to a wide range of frequency, from 2 GHz to 10 GHz focusing on two WLAN bands. Our proposed antenna is thin, flexible, rather compact, has good performance with the return loss of over 20 dB at 2.45 GHz, over 30 dB at 5.5 GHz. It exhibits very large bandwidth (2.15 GHz to over 10 GHz). The radiation patterns are nearly omni-directional at 2.45 GHz and more directive at 5.5 GHz. The design was realized by screen printing technology at CTP. The measurement results are in good agreement with the simulation which confirms the validity of the design.