An electrically-small, 3-D cube antenna fabricated with additive manufacturing

Author

Nassar, Ibrahim T. ; Weller, Thomas M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng., Univ. of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

fYear

2013

fDate

21-23 Jan. 2013

Firstpage

162

Lastpage

164

Abstract

This paper presents the design of an electrically small, 3-D cube antenna that is fabricated using laser-based layer-by-Iayer stereolithography processing (SLA). The antenna consists of a balun and a half-wave dipole with meandered-line portions, all of which are patterned on the surface of a cube. The antenna operational frequency is 2.45 GHz and its measured 10 dB return loss bandwidth is 3.75^%. Ka of the proposed design is 0.73 and its measured gain is -0.5 dBi. The gain is decreased by 2.5 dB compared with a previous prototype made with printed circuit board (PCB) technology using a commercial microwave substrate. However, the SLA fabrication approach significantly improves the manufacturing repeatability.

Keywords

UHF antennas; dipole antennas; printed circuits; stereolithography; PCB technology; SLA fabrication approach; additive manufacturing; balun; electrically-small 3-d cube antenna; frequency 245 GHz; half-wave dipole; laser-based layer-by-layer stereolithography processing; manufacturing repeatability; meandered-line portions; printed circuit board; Antenna measurements; Dipole antennas; Gain; Materials; Stereolithography; Wireless sensor networks; 3-D antennas; Electrically small antennas; stereolithography; wireless sensor networks (WSNs);

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF), 2013 IEEE 13th Topical Meeting on

Conference_Location

Austin, TX

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1552-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4673-1551-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SiRF.2013.6489466

Filename

6489466