CPW-Antenna Arrays with High Efficiency for Wireless Communications at 5.8 GHz

This paper presents a new technique for antenna efficiency enhancement in order to improve the gain of CPW antenna arrays. A grounded CPW-slot antenna array fed through an inductive coupled CPW-line operating at 5.8 GHz is considered. To recover the surface wave losses in antenna arrays, which decrease the antenna efficiency, a technique consisting on including pins as vias is introduced. This approach increases the array efficiency from 64% to ~95% at the operating frequency. The array gain achieves then an improvement of 2 dBi. To validate this approach, an antenna array with pins was fabricated and measured. A good agreement between numerical and experimental results was obtained.