MUTUAL COUPLING REDUCTION USING MICROMACHINED COMPLEMENTARY MEANDER LINE SLOTS FOR A PATCH ARRAY ANTENNA
Seahee Hwangbo
This letter presents new micro-fabricated point symmetric meander line slots (ML) inserted on the ground plane to reduce mutual coupling between narrowly spaced patches in a 2x1 patch array antenna for a WLAN application (4.94 – 4.99 GHz). The distance between the patches is 2mm (edge-to-edge space: 0.06 λg) and the ML slot unit cell has a dimension of 1.37 mm x 9.62 mm. The resonant frequency mismatch between S11 and S22 caused by the asymmetric structure of a single ML slot has been mitigated by placing two ML slots in a complementary point symmetric fashion. The ML slots on the ground plane have been fabricated using photolithography and electrodeposition, where the smallest dimension is 160 um. The fabricated antenna shows a maximum isolation improvement of 34.3 dB and no resonant frequency shift between S11 and S22.
Keywords: Array antenna, Mutual coupling, coupling reduction and meander line (ML) slot