Design of differentially-driven aperture-coupled microstrip antenna

• Main Author: Paul, Saw William Blessing.
• Other Authors: Zhang Yue Ping
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Wireless communication systems; DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Antennas, wave guides, microwaves, radar, radio
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/55212
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Microstrip antennas have been one of the most innovative research fields in the design of antenna for the past three decades. It has many advantages such as light-weight, small-size, and can be matched to the host surface. Printed-circuit technology is used to produce these antennas with low cost for mass production. These antennas are replacing many conventional antennas. This report describes the design and simulation of a differentially-driven aperture-coupled microstrip antenna using aperture coupled feed technique. It is one of the feeding techniques in microstrip antenna. The main method for the transfer of power between the patch and its feed line is the coupling mechanism. The design is like the conventional three layer structure visible aperture coupled microstrip antenna(ACMA): feed lines at the bottommost layer, the ground plane with slot(aperture) at the mid layer and the patch at topmost layer. A differential antenna is proposed in this design due to lower noise, lower susceptibility to the interference and more appropriate for high-level integration of radio systems. Before the design of differentially-driven aperture-coupled microstrip antenna, the design formulas for single ended microstrip antenna are studied to get the design parameters. High Frequency Structural Simulator (HFSS), one of several commercial tools for antenna design is used to design and simulate this differentially-driven aperture-coupled microstrip antenna. Lastly, different results in the software simulation concluded that the systematic tuning and modification of patch size, slot sizes and microstrip feed lines length are needed to achieve the proposed frequency 2GHz with the return loss of -10dB.