Flexible Artificial Magnetic Conductor Reflector for Wearable Antenna Application

Wearable communication systems required high performance, compact and flexible antenna devices. In this paper, a flexible artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) reflector is designed using square patch array for wearable antenna application at the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) frequency of 2.45 GHz. The proposed AMC reflector is composed of 3 × 3 squares patches with concentric slots to gain the wide bandwidth response. A flexible dielectric material of RO3003@ from Rogers Corporation with the relative permittivity of 3.0 and the thickness of 0.5 mm is used as a dielectric substrate for the reflector deployment as well as for the wearable antenna. The characterization results show that the integration of flexible AMC reflector with a wearable antenna has improved radiation characteristic and gain of the antenna. The results indicate that the proposed flexible AMC reflector has the feasibility for performance enhancement of wearable antenna especially in wireless body area network (WBAN) communications.