IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

2, 2003

111

Harmonics Reduction With Defected Ground Structure for a Microstrip Patch Antenna
Y. J. Sung, M. Kim, and Y.-S. Kim
AbstractIn this letter, a microstrip patch antenna using the defected ground structure (DGS) to suppress higher order harmonics is presented. An H-shaped defect on the ground plane with only one or more unit lattices has been utilized and yielded bandstop characteristics. Comparing with a conventional microstrip patch antenna without the DGS unit cell, the radiated power of the DGS patch antenna at harmonic frequencies has been drastically decreased. Index TermsDefected ground structure (DGS), harmonics reduction, microstrip atch antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION

CTIVE antennas using microstrip patch antennas have been widely investigated because a microstrip antenna is a planar type structure and easy to be integrated with active devices [1][3]. For an active antenna, the radiation level of both active and passive (antenna) devices is wanted for being very low at the harmonic frequencies [4]. In this case, a simple matching circuit may be needed between the active device and the patch antenna. On the contrary, it is usually necessary to add either the lowpass or bandpass filter that can reject the spurious signals. But, this approach increases a RF front-end size and yields an additional insertion loss. In [5], an active antenna using an indented rectangular patch has been proposed. This antenna has been shown experimentally to reduce harmonic radiation and resulted in increasing conversion efficiency. A two-element active array using dual linear polarization and sequential rotation by means of harmonic and spurious control in an active patch antenna by the input impedance of patch antenna at the harmonic frequencies has been introduced [6]. The suppression of undesired frequencies in a microwave integrated circuit (MIC) environment can be accomplished with the defected ground structure (DGS) cell, which provides the bandgap and slow wave with different manner of photonic bandgap (PBG) [7]. The etched structures on the ground plane have been applied for microwave filter, antenna, power amplifier, and oscillator [8][10]. In this letter, a new technique to reduce the higher order harmonics in microstrip patch antenna is proposed using an H-shaped DGS is presented and compared with a conventional microstrip patch antenna without the DGS unit cell. It is well known that the DGS unit cell acts as the stopband filter at some frequency bands.
Manuscript received March 26, 2003; revised April 7, 2003. The authors are with the Radio Science Engineering Department, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Korea. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2003.815281

Fig. 1. Top view of the proposed DGS patch antenna.

II. SQUARE-PATCH ANTENNAS A regular square patch with an inset cut is designed on the and thicksubstrate which has a relative permittivity ness , while the other one is with the DGS on the ground plane. The square patch antenna dimension is and its resonant frequency is 1.82 GHz. The dimensions of the inset cut are and , which results in a good match with a 50 microstripline. Fig. 1 depicts the configuration of the DGS microstrip patch antenna, which is composed of one square patch on the upper plane and an etched H-shape structure on the ground plane. The lattice dimenof the DGS unit is assigned to 20 mm 2 mm and sion the etched gap distance is 0.2 mm. The lattice dimension of a DGS unit is optimized from the simulation result so that the inserof a two-port DGS unit (a simple 50 microstrip tion loss transmission line with the DGS on the ground plane) is lower than 20 dB around the second and third harmonic frequencies. The simulated and measured reflection coefficients of the regular patch antenna and the patch antenna with the DGS unit cell are shown in Fig. 2. The measured results are well agreed with the simulation ones. The reflection coefficient of the DGS patch antenna depends on position of the DGS unit cell. An optimal value has been obtained by choosing . It may be observed that several modes are excited in the regular patch antenna. The first three modes are usually denoted by , , and (these are related with the first, second, and third harmonic frequencies). These modes, which are

1536-1225/03$17.00 2003 IEEE

112

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 2, 2003

Fig. 2.

Simulated and measured reflection coefficients.

(a)

(a)

(b) Fig. 4. Radiation patterns. (a) E -plane. (b) H -plane.

(b) Fig. 3. Simulated two-dimensional distribution of E -field on the top side of the substrate at the frequency f = 3:62 GHz. (a) Without the DGS unit cell. (b) With the DGS unit cell.

corresponded with longitudinal current distribution on the patch, have nulls at the radiation edges. Other resonance at the higher frequencies is also generated owing to inset cuts. For the DGS patch antenna, this kind of resonance is appropriately suppressed except at the fundamental frequency. Small undesired dips at the frequencies and above are not identified as a harmonic resonance. Plots of the magnitude of the -field

distribution for the regular patch antenna and the DGS patch antenna are shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b). The white region means the peak -field, while the dark area has almost no -field. Both plots have been normalized at the same minimum and maximum value. The -field of the DGS patch antenna is effectively eliminated at the second harmonic frequency . Whereas a lot of PBG holes should be given to the ground plane beneath the microstrip patch and feedline, one unit cell of DGS lattice has enough to reduce signals at the harmonic frequencies. The PBG holes beneath the patch antenna gives rise to a much lower front-to-back ratio ( 5 dB) and have relative low efficiency due to a severe back radiation. Therefore, it results in the reduction of its total gain [7]. From the measurement, the gain of the DGS antenna is similar to that of the regular antenna due to a little etched area beneath the patch (the gain of the regular patch antenna: 4.9 dBi, that of the DGS patch antenna: 4.8 dBi). The radiation patterns in the - and -planes are measured at the resonant frequencies. These results are plotted in Fig. 4. The standard horn antenna is used as a test antenna. The antenna radiates in the broadside direction, maintaining a front-to-back ratio of 10 dB and cross-polarization level of less than 13 dB at

SUNG et al.: HARMONICS REDUCTION WITH DEFECTED GROUND STRUCTURE

113

the operating frequency . As compared with the radiation profile (front-to-back ratio 10 dB, cross-polarization level 15 dB) of a conventional patch antenna, there is little distortion due to the etched H-shape structure on the ground plane. In Fig. 4, it may be observed that a second harmonic suppression of nearly 20 dB is achieved with a DGS unit cell. Because it is too small to detect the received power, the power level at the third harmonic frequency is not shown in this paper. III. CONCLUSION In this letter, the microstrip patch antenna having harmonic suppression has been presented, which is based on a stopband characteristic of the DGS cell. It has demonstrated that high harmonic suppression ( 20 dB), as well as very good performance at the designed frequency (antenna gain of 4.8 dBi and return 10 dB), has been achieved in this type of antenna. It loss is well suited to compact, low-cost active circuit applications at microwave frequencies. REFERENCES
[1] G. F. Avitabile, S. Maci, G. B. Gentili, L. Roselli, and G. F. Manes, Two-port active coupled microstrip antenna, Electron. Lett., vol. 28, pp. 22772279, Dec. 1992.

[2] C.-C.Chien-Chang Huang and T.-H.Tah-Hsiung Chu, A slot-coupled patch antenna loaded with a MESFET oscillator, in Proc. IEEE Antennas and Propagation Soc. Symp. Dig., 1994, pp. 798801. [3] X.-D.Xiao-Dong Wu and K.Kai Chang, Novel active FET circular patch antenna arrays for quasioptical power combining, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 42, pp. 766771, May 1994. [4] K. C. Gupta and P. S. Hall, Analysis and Design of Integrated Circuit Antenna Modules. New York: Wiley, 2000. [5] E. A. Elkhazmi, N. J. McEwan, and N. T. Ali, Harmonic impedance and radiation control for an active patch antenna, in Proc. 2nd Int. Conf.00 Microwave and Millimeter Wave Technology, Sept. 2000, pp. 251256. [6] M. J. Cryan, P. S. Hall, K. S. Tang, and J. Sha, Integrated active antenna with full duplex operation, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 45, pp. 17421748, Oct. 1997. [7] Y. Horri and M. Tsutsumi, Harmonic control by photonic bandgap on microstrip patch antenna, IEEE Microwave Guided Lett., vol. 9, pp. 1315, Jan. 1999. [8] V. Radisic, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, Broad-band power amplifier using dielectric photonic structure, IEEE Microwave Guided Wave Lett., vol. 8, pp. 1314, Jan. 1998. [9] F. R. Yang, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, A novel uniplanar compact PBG structure for filter and mixer applications, in Proc. IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Soc. Symp. Dig., Anaheim, CA, June 1999, pp. 919922. [10] D. Ahn, J.-S. Park, C.-S. Kim, J. Kim, Y. Qian, and T. Itoh, A design of the low-pass filter using the novel microstrip defected ground structure, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 49, pp. 8693, Jan. 2001.