A Miniaturized Ground Edge Current Choke—Design, Measurement, and Applications

We propose a miniaturized microwave current choke for blocking the current flowing along the edge of a substrate's ground plane. The proposed current choke is composed of a printed inductor and a printed capacitor, which possesses a size much smaller than a conventional quarter-wavelength current choke. By introducing the choke at one side of the ground plane, an effective electrical open circuit is performed for reflecting the ground edge current. The size of the proposed ground edge current choke (GECC) is as small as around 0.06 wavelength in free space. Two applications of the GECC are presented in this paper. The first is the radiation pattern regulation of a printed monopole antenna with long ground plane. The GECC in this application reflects the induced traveling-wave current along the ground plane edge and changes it to a standing-wave one, thus regulating the tilted radiation pattern due to the traveling-wave current to a broadside pattern. The other application is the decoupling of two nearby monopole antennas. By placing the proposed compact GECC in between the antennas, it is found that the isolation between the antenna ports can be enhanced from 8 dB to 32 dB. The experimental results agree well with the simulation, which demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed GECC.