Patch antennas are attractive in many mobile communication applications. However, the traditional patch antenna suffers from narrow frequency bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the use of a liquid crystal substrate for a patch antenna whose frequency can be tuned by changing the biasing voltage across the substrate.
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Original Title
Tunable Patch Antenna Using a Liquid Crystal Substrate
Patch antennas are attractive in many mobile communication applications. However, the traditional patch antenna suffers from narrow frequency bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the use of a liquid crystal substrate for a patch antenna whose frequency can be tuned by changing the biasing voltage across the substrate.
Patch antennas are attractive in many mobile communication applications. However, the traditional patch antenna suffers from narrow frequency bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the use of a liquid crystal substrate for a patch antenna whose frequency can be tuned by changing the biasing voltage across the substrate.
TUNABLE PATCH ANTENNA USING A LIQUID CRYSTAL SUBSTRATE
Ranjan Bose] and A/oka Sinha
Department of Electrical Engineering l and Department of Physics 2 , lIT Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, INDIA -110016 Phone: +91-11-26591048, Fax: +91-11-26581606, Email: rbose@ee.iitd.ac.in Keywords: Tunable Patch Antenna, Liquid Crystal ABSTRACT Patch antennas are attractive in many mobile communication applications since they are light-weight and simple to manufacture. However, the traditional patch antenna suffers from narrowfrequency bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the use ofa liquid crystal substratefor a patch antenna whose frequency can be tuned by changing the biasing voltage across the substrate. It has been found by simulations that by varying the biasing voltage from 0 V through 11 the operatingfrequency ofthe circular patch antenna can be varied from 1.08 GHz through 2.35 GHz. We have also proposed two novel applications for such tunable antennas: (i) antenna based modulation (ARM) and (ii) antenna basedfrequency diversity (ABFD). 1. INTRODUCTION Modem printed circuit fabrication techniques have made it possible to build low profile antennas that are extremely useful. Such antennas are referred to as microstrip or printed circuit antennas [1]. A microstrip antenna is made up of two parallel conductors that are separated by a dielectric substrate, as shown in Figure 1. The lower conductor usually acts as a ground plane and the upper conductor is a patch, which is why such antennas are also called patch antennas. The patch can be of various shapes such as rectangular, circular, square, elliptical, dipole and triangular among others. Patch antennas are inherently resonant antennas characterized by extremely low bandwidths. In addition, they are usually light in weight and easy to install because of which they are frequently used in mobile-phones, aircraft, satellite and missile applications. Simplicity, low manufacturing cost and the flexibility to configure to specialized geometries are some of the other advantages of patch antennas [2]. The traditional patch antenna suffers from low efficiency and narrow frequency bandwidth. Thus, improved patch antenna designs have been pursued for many years. One part of the patch antenna that can be optimized is the substrate [3]. This can be done by designing different regions with constant permittivity [4]. Patch antennas on inhomogeneous substrate with the permittivity continuously varying with the height coordinate have been 1-4244-1539-Xl08/$25.00 2008 IEEE proposed in [5, 6]. These antennas show improved bandwidth and directivity. Patch antenna with inhomogeneous dielectric substrate has also been investigated in [7] under the assumption of a fixed current distribution on the patch. In all these approaches the permittivity of the substrate varies along the thickness of the substrate. In effect, the behavior of the patch antenna with inhomogeneous substrate can be approximated by a homogeneous substrate with the effective value of the permittivity, &eff. The reported increase in the bandwidth of such patch antennas is marginal. Recently, tunable ferroelectric antennas for fixed frequency scanning applications have also been proposed where the scan angle is varied using a bias voltage [8]. In this paper we propose a technique that allows us to design and construct a tunable patch antenna whose resonance frequency can be varied using a bias voltage. By tunability we imply that the same antenna can be tuned to resonate (hence radiate) over a range of frequencies. Such tunable antenna technology will be an enabler for software defined radios (SDR). The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the patch antenna, with the liquid crystal substrate, used to demonstrate the concept. In Section 3 we explain the modeling of the liquid crystal substrate. The experimentally measured capacitance values of an actual Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal cell is used in this paper. Section gives the simulation results for a circular patch antenna on a Liquid Crystal substrate. Beside the obvious application in SDRs, we propose two novel applications of the tunable patch antennas in Section 5. The paper concludes in Section 6. 2. ANTENNA DESCRIPTION For the sake of illustration we have considered a circular patch antenna. The resonance frequency, j,., of a circular patch antenna is given by [1] 1. J (l) where c 3 xl 0 8 mis, r is the radius of the patch and is the permittivity. In order to achieve tunability of the resonance frequency, we use a suitable liquid crystal (LC) as the substrate material. By varying the dc bias voltage across the LC substrate, the of the LC changes [9]. The change in the value of leads to the change in the resonance frequency of the patch antenna. It should be noted that upon applying the bias voltage, the permittivity of the cylinder underneath the circular patch differs from the permittivity of the remainder of the substrate. Figure 2 shows a typical profile of the relative permittivity for a patch antenna with a LC substrate with a certain bias voltage. Our proposed LC based patch antenna differs from the earlier patch antennas on inhomogeneous substrates in the following two key aspects: (i) For our case while for the other cases where is the height coordinate along the thickness of the substrate. (ii) For our case the resonance frequency can be tuned using a bias voltage while for the other cases the resonance frequency of the patch antenna is fixed. For our tunable antenna, the total voltage (VIOl) on the patch comprises of the dc biasing voltage bias ) and the information bearing small-signal voltage (Vsig) that actually excites the antenna. Thus, where, Cdc is the permittivity at zero bias voltage and is the variance. The Gaussian fit with Cdc = 11.859 and = 25 is also plotted in Figure 4 using the dotted line. From (1) and (4) we obtain )J::a;) (5) 2nrF: From (5) we note that the resonance frequency of the antenna varies as ~ e V b ~ a s with the bias voltage. Using (5) and the calculated permittivity values (Figure 4), we obtain the range of resonance frequencies over which the LC based circular patch antenna can be tuned. This is shown in Figure 5. Thus, it is possible to vary the operating frequency of the same circular patch antenna from 1.1098 GHz through 2.7184 GHz simply by varying the biasing voltage from 0 V through 11 V across its LC substrate. We have also plotted (using dotted line) the theoretical f,. obtained using the Gaussian fit. 3. MODELING THE LIQUID CRYSTAL SUBSTRATE As a specific example, we analyze a circular patch antenna on a ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC) substrate. The characteristics of this FLC are listed in Table I. A patch antenna on a liquid crystal substrate is easy to construct. Effectively, it is a liquid crystal cell filled with an appropriate liquid crystal mixture and a metal contact of a desired shape, serving as the patch. The experimentally measured values of the capacitance (in nF) of the FLC cell as a function of the applied voltage across the cell is plotted in Figure 3. The cell thickness was 1.4 Jlm and the ITO electrode area was 4 cm 2
Treating the LC cell as a parallel plate capacitor, we have
C (3) 4. SIMULATION RESULTS Simulations were carried out on actual circular patch antenna geometries to verify our claim. We have modeled the circular patch antenna using the software CST Microwave Studio, which is a 3D electromagnetic field simulation software. The patch antenna geometry is shown in Figure 6. The scattering parameter SII for bias voltages OV, 3V, 6V and 10V are plotted in Figure 7. SII represents the return loss of the antenna, and the trough in the S11 plot is indicative of the resonance frequency of the antenna [1]. The results from actual antenna simulations along with the theoretically predicted values are listed in Table II. We observe from the table that the resonance frequency values obtained from actual antenna simulations are lower than the theoretically predicted values, though the values match much better at low V bias ' This is because the f,. calculated using (1) assumes a constant value of the permittivity of the substrate while for actual antenna simulations, the dielectric cylinder underneath the circular patch is surrounded by a material of higher permittivity. We have also listed the maximum radiated power (in dBi), where dBi is with reference to an isotropic antenna. Let us define the fractional bandwidth of the tunable antenna as B fmax - fmin Af (6) where, fmax is the maximum resonant frequency, fmin is the minimum resonant frequency andIe is the center frequency of operation. For the tunable patch antenna discussed in Table II, B =(2.35 -1.08)/1.71 0.74 or 74%. (2) (4) VIOl bias sig where C is the capacitance of the LC cell, is the permittivity of the free space, is the permittivity of the dielectric, A is the area of the plate (in our case the ITO electrode area) and d is the thickness of the cell. Using (3), the permittivity of the LC cell is calculated for different V bias and plotted in Figure 4. From the figure we observe that the values of the permittivity of the LC filled parallel plate capacitor, as a function of the bias voltage bias ) is approximately Gaussian. Thus, we can write _(V 7as ) () 20-2 ~ i a s Gdc e 5. TWO NOVEL APPLICATIONS In this section we describe two novel applications of the tunable patch antenna. The first application is an antenna based modulator (ABM) which can carry out Frequency Shift Keying (FSK). As opposed to the traditional communication systems where the modulator block is separate from the antenna, here we propose to use the antenna as a modulator as well. Using the tunable patch antenna, the bias voltage can be used to select the frequency that is transmitted in accordance with a given data stream. Let the input waveform to the antenna be vet) Ai cos(27r/;t) bias (t) i=O where Ai is a constant scale factor and is lh frequency of the M-ary FSK. The bias voltage, Vbiait) , takes discrete values and is changed according to the input bit-stream in order to tune the antenna at the desired Thus, for a particular value of Vbiai t), only one particular frequency is transmitted thereby carrying out the MFSK modulation. The second application of tunable patch antenna is to mitigate fading by using frequency diversity. Let two input waveforms to the antenna, at different instances in time, be VI (t) met) bias and 2 (t) met) COS(2Jif2t ) bias where m(t) is the message signal, V bias corresponds to the bias voltage resulting in the resonance frequency bias corresponds to the bias voltage resulting in the resonance frequency ii, and the frequencies andii are chosen such that = ii the coherence bandwidth of the channel. Since the frequencies are separated by a band greater than the coherence bandwidth of the channel, they will fade independently [10]. This example can be extended to independently fading carriers to provide diversity of order Thus, the tunable patch antenna can be used for antenna based frequency diversity (ABFD). 6. CONCLUSION We have proposed, for the first time, a tunable patch antenna with a liquid crystal substrate. The operating frequency of this patch antenna can be tuned simply by changing the biasing voltage across the substrate. It has been shown that the resonance frequency of the tunable antenna varies as -.; with the bias voltage. We have carried out simulations using actual patch antenna geometries and experimentally measured permittivity values of a ferroelectric liquid crystal substrate. The simulation results agree well with the theoretically predicted values. The proposed technique is simple, practical and has far-reaching consequence in the area of wireless communications. We have also described two novel applications of such tunable antennas: (i) antenna based modulation (ABM) and (ii) antenna based frequency diversity (ABFD). REFERENCES [1] C.A. Balanis, Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, John Wiley Sons, 1997. [2] W.L. Stutzman and G.A.Thiele, Antenna Theory and Design, John Wiley Sons, 1998. [3] N. G. Alexopoulos, P. B. Katehi, and D. Rutledge, "Substrate Optimization for Integrated Circuit Antennas," IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., Volume 83, Issue 7, Jul. 1983. pp. 550 - 557. [4] C. S. Lee, V. Nalbandian and F. Schwering, "Dual- frequency microstrip antenna with inhomogeneously filled dielectric substrate," Microwave Opt. Techn. Lett., vol. 6, No. 11, 1993,pp.629-632. [5] L. Vegni, F. Bilotti and A. Toscano, "Microstrip disk antennas with inhomogeneous artificial dielectrics," J. Electro. Waves Applic., vol. 14, No.9, 2000. pp. 1203- 1227. [6] A. Toscano and L. Vegni, "Full-wave analysis of planar stratified media with inhomogeneous layers," IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., Volume 48, Issue 4, April 2000. pp. 631-633. [7] G. Kristensson, P. Waller and A. Derneryd, Technical Report LUTEDX/(TEAT-7100)/1--48/(2001), Lund Institute of Technology, Department of Electroscience, P.O. Box 118, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden, 2001. http://www.es.1th.se. [8] G. Lovat, P. Burghignoli and S. Celozzi, "A Tunable Ferroelectric Antenna for Fixed-Frequency Scanning Applications," IEEE Ant. and Wireless Prop. Let., vol. 5, 2006, pp. 353-356. [9] L.M. Blinov, E.P. Pozhidaev, F.V. Podgornov, S.A. Pikin, S.P. Palto, A. Sinha, A. Yasuda, S. Hashimoto and W. Haase, " 'Thresholdless' hysteresis-free switching as an apparent phenomenon of surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cell," Physical Review E, vol. 66, 21701, 2002. [10] T. S. Rappaport, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice, 2 nd Ed., Prentice-Hall, New York, 2001. Table II. Resonance frequency values for the tunable . I h d'ffj b' clrcu ar patc antenna or erent las vo ages. Theoretical Actual antenna Bias Values simulations Voltage using Max. (V) from the (GHz) Radiated Eq. Gaussian Power fit (dBi) (GHz) (GHz) 0 1.1098 1.1098 1.08 4.84 3 1.2157 1.2143 1.19 5.18 6 1.8328 1.5907 1.72 5.96 10 2.4816 3.0167 2.22 6.61 11 2.7184 3.7217 2.35 6.73 Table I. Characteristics of the FLC. Attribute Value Transition Cr-l0C-SmC-58C- Temperatures SmA-80C-Iso Polarization 100 nC/cm 2 Tilt angle 23.5 deg Viscosity 0.7 Poise z Patch (metal) Substrate (dielectric) z Ground ~ -------LbJ----- Figure I - Cross section of a patch antenna Figure 2 - A typical profile of the permittivity for a patch antenna with an LC substrate and a bias voltage. 10 -10 4 oo.....- ..a.- -'-- 2 8 10 ': :- . 10 -10 1. J. . 25 _L_ -1 .. .......l.. _ .l.. . .1' t" O'-----------..a.---.........--------'
OJ (J c $ 15 0- o 10 Figure 3 - Measured values of the capacitance (in nF) of the FLC cell as a function of the applied voltage across the cell with thickness d 1.4Ilm. Figure 4 - Calculated values of the permittivity of the FLC cell as a function of the applied voltage across the cell and the Gaussian fit with (j 5 (dotted curve). dim.... in mrn 10 -10 1L....-_...I--_--..L-__L....-_-'--_.......L.._-...J o, , , , .. " .. 0 ,
Figure 5 - Resonance frequencies as a function of the bias voltage.
The dotted line represents the predicted values from the Gaussian fit. Figure 6 - The geometry of the circular patch antenna modeled using CST Microwave Studio. V bias = 0 V J,. 1.08 GHz V bias 3 V J,. = 1.19 GHz V bias 6 V J,. = 1.72 GHz V bias = 10 V J,. = 2.22 GHz V bias 11 V J,. 2.35 GHz Figure 7 - The Sll (return loss) plots for bias =OV, 3V, 6V, IOV and IIV obtained from actual antenna simulations of the circular patch antenna with FLC substrate.