Compact Chip-Resistor Loaded Active Integrated Patch Antenna for ISM Band Applications

As technology is moving towards miniature structures, demand for designing efficient compact antennas is increasing simultaneously. So it would be valuable to improve the features of small antennas, such as bandwidth and gain. A compact chip-resistor loaded microstrip antenna at 2.48 GHz frequency for industrial scientific and medical (ISM) band, with dimensions of 10 × 10 mm² is presented in this paper. With a novel geometry design, antenna is promoted to an active integrated antenna (AIA) on a two-layer printed circuit board (PCB), which contains passive antenna and active circuitry with a common ground plane. A monolithic amplifier is used to have an improvement around 10 dB in antenna gain. The impedance bandwidth has been increased during chip-resistor loading and adding active circuitry processes. For chip-resistor loaded antenna, that is 5.7 and 9.48% in simulation and measurement respectively. Moreover, the active integrated antenna has the measured impedance bandwidth of 58.7%. Since the low gain and narrow bandwidth of compact microstrip antennas might be a challenge for their operation, by compensating these drawbacks, proposed antenna would become more practical for special medical diagnostic applications, where doctors need stronger signals for monitoring.