A Compact Slot Antenna Utilizing a Right/Left-Handed Transmission Line Feed

A novel compact planar antenna utilizing cascaded right/left-handed transmission lines is proposed. The significance of layout planning with respect to radiation is investigated and discussed in this paper. Two segments of transmission lines of the same electrical length with opposite signs are cascaded to provide zero phase at the operation frequency. The closed-form formulas for the equivalent circuit of a transmission line are used for circuit design. Both antenna layout and radiation mechanism are discussed. For experimental demonstration, the proposed antenna operating at 2.45 GHz was implemented on an FR4 substrate. The topology using several patches has quite smaller size than the conventional patch antenna. Besides, a fairly omnidirectional radiation pattern was measured.