Composite right/left-handed transmission line based compact resonant antennas for RF module integration

Several electrically small resonant antennas employing the composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) are presented for integration with portable RF modules. The proposed antenna designs are based on the unique property of anti-parallel phase and group velocity of the CRLH-TL at its fundamental mode. In this mode, the propagation constant increases as the frequency decreases, therefore, a small guided wavelength can be obtained at a lower frequency to provide the small lambda_g/2 resonant length used to realize a compact antenna design. Furthermore, the physical size and the operational frequency of the antenna depend on the unit cell size and the equivalent transmission line model parameters of the CRLH-TL, including series inductance, series capacitance, shunt inductance and shunt capacitance. Optimization of these parameters as well as miniaturization techniques of the physical size of unit cell is investigated. A four unit-cell resonant antenna is designed and tested at 1.06 GHz. The length, width and height of the proposed antenna are 1/19lambda₀, 1/23lambda₀ and 1/83lambda₀, respectively. In addition, a compact antenna using a 2-D three by three mushroom like unit cell arrangement is developed at 1.17 GHz, showing that an increased gain of 0.6 dB and higher radiation efficiency can be achieved over the first prototype antenna. The same design is applied in the development of a circularly polarized antenna operating at 2.46 GHz. A 116deg beamwidth with axial ratio better than 3 dB is observed. The physical size of the proposed mushroom type small antenna and the circularly polarized antenna is 1/14lambda₀ by 1/14lambda₀ by 1/39lambda₀ and 1/10lambda₀ by 1/10lambda ₀ by 1/36lambda₀, respectively