Liquid crystal-reconfigurable conformal monopole antennas structures for microwave applications

In this article, the design of conformal monopole antennas on a very thin layer of flexible liquid crystals (LCs) is introduced. The flexible LC substrate can be bent and folded over the module case, resulting in a tight integration of the antenna with the frontend module. Firstly, a meander monopole antenna, designed for single band operation, is presented with details of the structure, simulation and measurement results. Secondly, a method to increase the peak gain and decrease the return loss of the antenna is proposed. The simulated results are compared with measured data, and good agreement is obtained.