A fully printed multilayer aperture-coupled patch antenna using hybrid 3D / inkjet additive manufacturing technique

In this paper, a fully additively manufactured multilayer aperture-coupled patch antenna operating at the ISM band around 2.4 GHz is demonstrated. For the first time, a hybrid additive manufacturing technique was utilized to fully print consecutive conductive and thick dielectric layers for 3D antennas topologies fabrication in the GHz frequency antenna fabrication. The metallization of 3D printed plastic dielectric layers was performed by inkjet printing layers of conductive ink. As a proof of concept, multiple layers of Diamine Silver Acetate (DSA) conductive ink were deposited to form a conductive thin layer on the surface of the 3D printed layers of Verowhite polymer. This novel fully printed antenna fabrication methodology could enable mass production of low cost printed RF circuits and antennas for a variety of scalable wireless sensor network and Internet of Things (IOT) as well as quick RF component prototyping.