Metallic wire substrate (MWS) microstrip structure: Characterization and application to a patch antenna

This paper presents the characterization of the novel metallic wire substrate (MWS) introduced in [1] and its application to a microstrip patch antenna. It is shown numerically that the MWS exhibits artificial magneto-dielectric properties with simultaneously enhanced effective permittivity and permeability over a large frequency band. Consequently, due to the higher effective refractive index, the effective wavelength is reduced which implies reduction in the size of the elements printed on the MWS. First, the MWS microstrip line is analyzed and a procedure for its effective constitutive parameters (¿,¿) extraction is described and a parametric analysis is carried out to show the range of ¿, ¿ values achievable with typical substrates. Then, a patch antenna with reduced size is demonstrated, discussed in terms of efficiency, gain and compared to a homogeneous substrate.