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2008 IEEE INTERNATIONAL RF AND MICROWAVE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS December 22-4, 2008, Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA

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Design of Small Antennas based on DNG Metamaterials

Hany E.Abd-El-Raouf1, Sulaiman Syed1 and Yahia M. M. Antar2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2 Department of Electrical Engineering, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7K 5LO. hea3@iiu.edu.my, email, suly_syed@yahoo.com, antar-y@rmc.ca
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Abstract - Two Double Negative (DNG) metamaterial antennas are presented. The design of the unit cell of each one of the two antennas is based on the composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) model. Two designs are introduced using single and double layer structures. The dispersion diagrams of the proposed antennas are evaluated and the resonant frequencies of the different modes in the RH and the LH ranges are determined from the dispersion diagrams. Field animations of the near field below the patches and near the vias for different modes will be presented.
Keywords: Antenna; Metamaterial; DNG; Double layer;

structure act as the main radiating elements of the antenna. The basic of the CRLH mushroom structure used, which is called Sievenpiper mushroom structure [9]. The animations of the zero order mode of each of the two proposed antennas show that the vias act as the main radiators and it is found also that the currents in the vias are in phase, which conforms to the observation of [8]. Another work based on this structure was referred as zeroth order resonator antenna [10]. In this paper we will design a new small antenna based on using double layers of CRLH structure. Detailed study of return loss, gain, and efficiency will be included in this research.

1. Introduction
Metamaterial periodic structures for microwave applications have being a very active research area in recent times. They were firstly introduced by Veselago [1] back in the 1967. Later on the materialization of such material was done by [2],[3] and [4]. Periodic array of copper wires with specific radii and spacing will produce a negative permittivity or the capacitivly loaded stripes (CLSs) will also has the same effect, while the negative permeability was induced using the split ring resonators. One of the other metamaterial realizations was conducted using Transmission Line theory (TL) [5] and [6]. These TL were composite of both right handed and left handed materials, so they were called Composite Left, Right-handed Metamaterials (CLRH). In [7] a Zeroth Order Resonator Antenna (ZOR) was introduced, which is microstrip-based unit cell consisting of interdigital capacitor and shunt meander line connected to a rectangular patch. Since the antennas resonant frequency is independent from physical dimension of ZOR, smaller antennas can be made. The size of the antenna is determined by the reactive loadings in the unit cell. Another antenna structure was proposed in [8] using CRLH metamaterial, where the vias in this

2. Theoretical Background
The unit cell of the metamaterial antenna which is used in this paper is shown in figure 1. The zero order resonant frequency depends mainly on the equivalent circuit of the unit cell, and therefore the electrical sizes of the proposed antennas are very small at the zero order resonant frequencies. Applying the TL theory on this structure, it can be seen that the structure is CLRH material. The conventional right capacitance CR and right inductance LR is obvious in the structure. CR is seen by the capacitance induced between the ground plate and the metal sheet. The LR is caused by the current fields in the metal sheet. The left handed TL is caused by the left capacitance CL and the left inductance LL. The LL is caused by current in the via which connects the ground plane with the metal sheet, while the CL is caused by the capacitance induced between the metallic patches through the gap. Figure 2 shows the DNG equivalent circuit for the antenna.

978-1-4244-2867-0/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE

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Gap

Height

Via

cell to introduce the shunt inductance LL. The gap between the patches is used to introduce the series capacitance CL. Full wave analysis of the proposed antenna is obtained by using CST Microwave Studio [11] and Ansoft HFSS [12] which are based on Finite Integration Method (FIM) and Finite Element Method (FEM) respectively.
15mm

Width

Length
Radius of 0.15 mm

7.3 mm

Figure 1: Sievenpiper unit cell.

15 mm 4.75mm

C 'L / z

L'R z

Z ' DNG

Gap of 0.2mm

Y'
C ' R z

L'L / z

Figure 3: Single layer DNG antenna.

Figure 2: Equivalent circuit.

A study of equivalent circuit model of DNG material was presented by C. Caloz and T. Itoh [6]. It is seen that the resonance frequency can be determined by these equations.
unbalanced

The antenna is fabricated and the return loss is measured. And the simulated and measured return losses of the proposed antenna are shown in Figure 4. Good agreement between the results of the CST, HFSS, and the measurements especially in the band 15GHz which includes the first negative and the zero order resonances.

=
4

1 L' R L ' R C ' L C ' L

balanced

1 L' C '

(1)
n=-1

3. Design of efficient DNG antenna

In this section, we present two different designs of DNG metamaterial small antennas. These antennas are; single layer DNG using single layer DNG using thin substrate, and double layer DNG using thick substrate.

n=0

Figure 4: Return loss of single layer DNG antenna.

3.1 Single layer DNG antenna printed on thin substrate

Figure 3 shows the geometry of the DNG Single layer antenna with thin substrate. The antenna is printed on a thin substrate of duroid r=2.2 with dimensions of 30mm x 35mm x 1.575mm. Two patches are printed on the substrate, each patch has dimensions of 15mm x 7.3mm with a gap between the two patches of 0.2mm. A microstrip line, of 4.75mm width, is used to feed the first patch through a gap of 0.2mm. A via with radius 0.15mm is used in each unit

Figure 4 shows that the antenna has a zeroth order resonance at the frequency 3.84 GHz. The draw back of this resonance is the small bandwidth which is equal to 1.02%. Figure 5 shows the gain at the zeroth order. It can be seen that the maximum gain is 1.96 dB, with a total radiation efficiency of 35%. The bandwidth of the first positive order resonance frequency (f = 1.8 GHz) is 5.27%, and the results shows a gain of 8.9 dB, with total radiation efficiency about 76%.

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Figure 5: Gain of single layer DNG antenna at zeroth order.

-20 dB while it was -12.5 dB for the single layer antenna. The gains at the resonant frequencies 2.9 GHz, 7 GHz, 11GHz, and 12.39GHz are 3.7 dB, 7.6 dB, 7.6 dB, and 6.2 dB respectively, achieving total radiation efficiency of 58%, 81%, 74% and 80%. The gain has been improved at the zero order resonance frequency (f =2.94 GHz) to be 3.77 while it was 1.96 dB at f =3.45GHz. The bandwidth at the resonance frequency 2.94 GHz of the double layer DNG antenna is 1.8% which is very narrow. One of the great advantages of this structure that it has a wide band (10.4-13 GHz) at the second order positive resonance. The bandwidth ratio of this band is 22.2%, and the gain at the frequency 11 GHz is 7.67 dB. The gain at zeroth order is shown in Fig 7

3.1 Double layer DNG antenna printed on thin substrate

In the following we introduce a new design of DNG antenna to improve the gain of the previous DNG antenna. This new designed is based on using two layers of metamaterials with a certain space d between the two layers, as shown in Figure 6 .

5. Summary
In this paper, we presented two new antennas based on metamaterial structure. It is found that using double layer of CRLH metamaterial structures enhance the efficiency and the gain of the antenna.

Substrate

Patches 1.575mm

References
[1] V. G. Veselago, The electrodynamics of substances with simultaneously negative values of and ,, Sov. Phys. Uspekhi, vol. 10, no. 4, pps. 509514. 1968. [2] J. B. Pendry, A. J. Holden, W. J. Stewart, I. Youngs, Extremely Low Frequency Plasmons in Metallic Mesostructures, Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 76, pps. 4773-4776. 1996. [3] J. B. Pendry, A. J. Holden, D. J. Robbins, and W. J. Stewart , Magnetism from Conductors and Enhanced Nonlinear Phenomena , IEEE Trans. on Microwave Theory and Tech., Vol. 47, No. 11,pp 2075 - 2084, Nov. 1999. [4] R.W. Ziolkowski, 2003. Design, fabrication, and testing of double negative metamaterials, IEEE Trans. on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 51, no. 7, pp. 1516-1529, July, 2003. [5] A. Sanada, C. Caloz, and T. Itoh,, Planar Distributed Structures With Negative Refractive Index, IEEE Trans. on Microwave Theory and Tech., Vol. 52, No. 4, April 2004. [6] C. Caloz, and T. Itoh, Electromagnetic Metamaterials: Transmission Line Theory and Microwave Applications, John Wiley & sons, Inc., 2006. [7] A. Sanada, M. Kimura, I. Awai, H. Kubo, C. Caloz, and T. Itoh, A planar zeroth order resonator antenna using left-handed transmission line, the European Microwave Conf., Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2004.

1.575mm Vias

Figure 6: Double layer DNG antenna.

Figure 7: Gain of double layer DNG antenna at zeroth order.

4. Analysis of results
The return loss shows that the zeroth order resonance frequency for this structure is lower than that of the single layer antenna and the return loss at the zeroth order is much lower than the case of single layer. It can be seen from the Figures that the first order positive resonance gives now return loss below

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[8] F. Qureshi, M. A. Antoniades, and G.V. Eleftheriades, A Compact and Low-Profile Metamaterial Ring Antenna with Vertical Polarization, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Letters, Vol. 4, pp. 333-336, 2005 [9] D. Seivenpiper, L. Zhang, R. F. Broas, N. G. Alexopolous and E. Yablonovitch, HighImpedance Electromagnetic Surfaces with Forbidden Frequency Band, IEEE Trans. On Microwave Theory and Techniques. Vol 47, No. 11, pp. 2059-2074, Novermber, 1999. [10] J.H. Park, Y.H. Ryu, J.G. Lee, and J.H. Lee, Epsilon Negative Zeroth-Order Resonator Antenna, IEEE Trans. on Antennas Propagation. Vol.55, No. 12, pp. 3710- 3712, December 2007. [11] http://www.cst.com/, Computer Simulation Technology [12] http://www.ansoft.com/products/hf/hfss/, 3D Fullwave Electromagnetic Field Simulation.

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