Performance enhanced miniaturized and electrically tunable patch antenna with patterned permalloy based magneto-dielectric substrate

Perspective magneto-dielectric materials with high permeability are potential substrates to miniaturize the patch antenna without deteriorating its performance. Besides its high permeability at high frequency, patterned Permalloy (Py) also presents tunable permeability by applying DC current. A performance enhanced miniaturized and electrically tunable patch antenna with patterned Py thin film is first presented and developed in this paper. To suppress the magnetic loss, the Py thin film layer is consisted of an array of 2 μm × 2 μm square Py patterns between the copper patch antenna and dielectric substrate. The DC current could be applied directly on Py patterns through the copper strip lines beneath the Py patterns along the length of patch antenna. The copper strip lines are specially designed with the same width of Py patterns and the thickness much less than the skin depth at the operating frequency, which can reduce their deteriorating effects to the performance of antenna. The structure of the antenna is presented and simulated with high frequency structure simulator. The results show that compared with non-magnetic antenna, the performance of Py thin film based antenna is improved with 50% bandwidth increase from 4 MHz to 8 MHz and 1.2 dB gain enhancement from 1.16 dB to 2.36 dB. The resonant frequency of the antenna could be continuously tuned from 937 MHz to 911 MHz with the permeability of Py thin film changing from 1750 to 1 900 by applying the DC current.