Miniaturized aperture-coupled microstrip antennas

An improved low profile design for aperture coupled microstrip antennas was proposed and developed for miniaturization. The most attractive feature for the proposed structure is that the structure uses a thin dielectric layer as a backreflector for blocking back-radiation instead of a metal plate with an additional dielectric layer. As a result, the proposed structure can not only keep the antenna small, but also effectively avoid the production of parallel plate modes. Theoretical analysis and simulations verify the validity of the proposed design.