Antennas in real, meta and virtual forms

Since the advent of Radio, the communication technology and remote sensing science have gone through continuous evolutions and transformative advances. Both these areas use electromagnetic waves for operation and antennas to generate, transmit, and receive them. Thus, the antenna area has also gone through transformative advances, from low gain low frequency wire antennas, to high gain high frequency antennas, and recently into millimeter bands. The move into high frequency bands has increased the resistive losses of the antennas and lowered their operating efficiencies. At the same time the antenna miniaturization, which has resulted from RFID and personalized device applications, have also impacted the antenna efficiency through increased losses. Therefore, there is a need for a new design concept to overcome the antenna losses. Device miniaturization and space limitations in ever increasing complexity of equipment have also increased the need for hardware minimizations. Both problems will be addressed in this paper and effective remedies will be presented using the engineered conductor design and the virtual array concept.