Design considerations for LTCC based UWB antennas for space applications

This paper presents a planar antenna using low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) substrate for extreme environment applications. An ultra wideband (UWB) elliptical patch antenna was designed and fabricated using an LTCC Ceramtec GC substrate to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology for wideband applications. The simulated results were further validated experimentally. The fabricated antenna provides a peak gain of 5dB over a bandwidth of 4 GHz (3 GHz–7 GHz) with return loss better than −10dB. The radiation pattern is omni-directional in the horizontal plane (θ=900) over the whole frequency range.