COMPOUND WIDEBAND RECONFIGURABLE ANTENNAS BASED ON PIN DIODES AND VO2 RF SWITCHES FOR C-BAND WIRELESS STANDARDS

Abstract

Wireless technology is one of the most important fields of research in the world of communication systems today, and a study of communication systems would be incomplete without an understanding of antenna functioning and manufacturing. This was the primary reason we chose a project in this field. Microstrip patch antennas are gaining popularity as more and more advancements are made in the wireless communication systems. They are being used in multiple fields and the scope of research and improvements is quite high in this area. A simple patch antenna is designed to work for only a single application, having frequency of operation within a certain frequency band range but a reconfigurable antenna enables us to reconfigure this frequency band based on our different requirements. It is possible to reconfigure different functionalities of an antenna, such as frequency, polarization, radiation pattern, bandwidth etc. The common practice of making the antennas reconfigurable is by adding switches like PIN diodes and Varacter diodes in the antenna which help in changing the state of the antenna when the biasing or voltage across the diodes is changed, making it possible to observe more than one resonating state for a designed antenna. In this project, two papers v were submitted for the conference in the same field of reconfigurable antennas. The first paper titled “Fox-Face Compound Reconfigurable Antenna for Wireless Systems” presents an antenna design of a compact structured CRA (Compound Reconfigurable antenna) in which compound reconfiguration is observed by using just two PIN diodes in the antenna structure. While the second paper titled “Bandwidth Reconfigurable Wideband Antenna with comparison between PIN diodes and Vanadium Dioxide switches” presents an approach where a bandwidth reconfiguration compact antenna is presented while also suggesting an alternate approach of using Vanadium diode switches instead of PIN diodes and comparing the results in the two approaches. Both antenna structures were designed and simulated by making use of the Ansys HFSS software and the respective results were observed and presented in the conference papers and the project report here.