FDTD simulation of a wide-band half volume DRA

The half volume dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is an interesting candidate to serve as a small wide-band antenna for new generation mobile phone handsets. The DRAs have relatively low losses and therefore they provide good radiation efficiency. Lehmus et al. (1999) observed that the bandwidth of a DRA is approximately proportional to the volume of the antenna in wavelengths. Thus, the main restriction in the miniaturization of the DRA is the availability and cost of suitable low-loss high-/spl epsiv/ dielectric materials. In this work we discuss the DRA design from the computational point of view. As a representative case we study a DRA manufactured from a material having /spl epsiv//sub r/´=16 and tan/spl delta/=7/spl times/10/sup -4/. We considered two models: 1) the antenna was placed above a finite ground plane, and 2) the antenna was placed on the top of a metal box representing a coarse mobile phone model.