Low-cost transfer printing of antennas for smart textiles

In this paper we present a grounded patch antenna that was designed and fabricated using a combination of the low-cost high-throughput techniques of screen printing and transfer printing. The advantage of these techniques is they allow the ground plane and antenna plane to be transfer printed in a single step. Conductive thread and conductive connecting snaps were built into the antenna for the purpose of attaching integrated circuits and sensing devices. In the demo case, the antenna is designed to meet the 900MHz band of LoRa networks.