A high-gain low-profile antenna design based on effective material parameters

This work presents the design of a high-gain antenna with an integrated zero-index metamaterial superstrate. An effective material parameter extraction algorithm is developed for structures lying between two different materials, and is used to design the metamaterial structure, which is placed on a layer of spacer above a patch antenna. With such a metamaterial superstrate, the realized broadside gain of a microstrip patch antenna is increased to 80% of perfect aperture at the working frequency of 10 GHz.