Conformal WLAN/WiMAX antenna on rigid-flex liquid crystalline polymer based substrate

Recent developments in liquid crystalline polymer (LCP)-based procesing technology have shown that highly-integrated, fully-packaged RF front-end modules with high performance can be designed by using the system-onpackage (SOP) approach. However, direct integration of a large antenna element to a small module package still remains an isue. This paper presents a novel conformal antenna structure which results in a compact integration of the antenna and the module package for 5GHz WLAN/WiMAX applications. The antenna is printed on a flexible LCP layer, protruding from a rigid multilayer organic substrate. The efects of a shielding metal case, which protects the asociated module circuitry from the near fields of the antenna, are also considered during the design proces. The flexible LCP substrate can be bent and folded over the module case, resulting in a tight integration of the antenna with the front-end module. The details of the design and the fabrication of the proposed structure, as well as the simulation and the measurement data are presented in this paper.