Wideband Circularly Polarized E-Shaped Patch Antenna for Wireless Applications [Wireless Corner]

A new technique to achieve a circularly polarized probe-fed single-layer microstrip-patch antenna with a wideband axial ratio is proposed. The antenna is a modified form of the conventional E-shaped patch, used to broaden the impedance bandwidth of a basic patch antenna. By letting the two parallel slots of the E patch be unequal, asymmetry is introduced. This leads to two orthogonal currents on the patch and, hence, circularly polarized fields are excited. The proposed technique exhibits the advantage of the simplicity of the E-shaped patch design, which requires only the slot lengths, widths, and position parameters to be determined. Investigations of the effect of various dimensions of the antenna have been carried out via parametric analysis. Based on these investigations, a design procedure for a circularly polarized E-shaped patch was developed. A prototype has been designed, following the suggested procedure for the IEEE 802.11big WLAN band. The performance of the fabricated antenna was measured and compared with simulation results. Various examples with different substrate thicknesses and material types are presented and compared with the recently proposed circularly polarized U-slot patch antennas.