IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

9, 2010

75

In Situ Optimization of Metamaterial-Inspired

Loop Antennas
Raoul O. Ouedraogo, Student Member, IEEE, Edward J. Rothwell, Fellow, IEEE, Alejandro Diaz,
Shih-Yuan Chen, Member, IEEE, Andrew Temme, Student Member, IEEE, and Kazuko Fuchi

AbstractA new methodology for designing metamaterial-inspired antennas using an in situ optimization technique is introduced. Through this approach, an optimization tool such as a genetic algorithm is used to design a metamaterial pattern adjacent
to an antenna to enhance the antennas performance. As an example, the technique is used for miniaturization purposes where
a loop antenna initially resonant at 2.45 GHz is made resonant at
960 MHz, providing a sevenfold reduction in antenna area over a
conventional loop designed to operate at 960 MHz.
Index TermsGenetic algorithm, loop antenna, metamaterial,
optimization.

I. INTRODUCTION

ETAMATERIALS are artificially engineered materials

with electromagnetic properties not readily found in nature. Typical metamaterial structures with negative permeability
(MNG) characteristics are derived from split-ring resonators
(SRRs), first introduced in [1], and include edge-coupled SRRs,
broadside-coupled SRRs, axially symmetric SRRs, omega
SRRs, and the S-rings, all of which are described in [2]. The
unconventional characteristics of these structures have led
to various applications related to device miniaturization and
performance enhancement.
It is shown in [2] and [3] that by incorporating homogeneous
metamaterials into the structures of antennas (creating metamaterial-based antennas), various properties such as size, gain,
and impedance may be dramatically improved. Similar results
can also be achieved by loading the antenna with one or more
metallic inclusions such as SRRs. These antennas are referred
to as metamaterial-inspired since the design of the inclusions
is based on their performance as a unit cell within a metamaterial [4][8]. The resonance behavior of the unit cell, which produces a negative permeability when used to compose a metamaterial, is utilized to alter the resonance behavior (particularly the resonant frequency) of the metamaterial-inspired an-

Manuscript received February 03, 2010. Date of publication February 17,

2010; date of current version March 05, 2010. This work was supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant 0800388.
R. O. Ouedraogo, E. J. Rothwell, and A. Temme are with the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing,
MI 48895 USA (e-mail: rothwell@egr.msu.edu).
A. Diaz and K. Fuchi are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48895 USA (e-mail: diaz@egr.
msu.edu).
S.-Y. Chen is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan
University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan (e-mail: sychen@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2010.2043409

tenna through coupling between the structures. When a metamaterial unit cell is placed adjacent to an antenna, mutual coupling causes the resonance frequency of the system to shift away
from the resonant frequency of the unloaded antenna and also
away from that of the unit cell. In a metamaterial-inspired design, only one unit cell is used. However, experience shows that
a resonance of the metamaterial-inspired antenna often occurs
near that of the metamaterial comprising arrays of the same unit
cell, which is generally much lower than that of the isolated
antenna. It is this effect that provides for the miniaturization
properties of metamaterial-inspired antennas. Unfortunately, it
is difficult to predict the precise shift in resonance frequency
produced by a particular inclusion, and design thus becomes
trial and error. Also, the resulting metamaterial-inspired antenna
might not meet the performance criteria of the original antenna,
and additional tuning thus becomes necessary to achieve the desired properties.
In [9], it is shown that gradient-based topology optimization can be used to tailor the electromagnetic properties of
metamaterial components to satisfy operational requirements,
thereby producing nonintuitive geometries quite different from
the classic SRR designs. Similar work is described in [10],
where a stochastic methoda genetic algorithm (GA)is used
to create a magnetic metamaterial. The concepts introduced
in [9] and [10] are used here to investigate the potential of in
situ optimization of metamaterial-inspired loop antennas. A
single unit cell is placed adjacent to a loop antenna, and the
geometry of the metallization of the cell is parameterized as
a pixelated grid. A full-wave simulation tool (HFSS) is used
to assess the performance of the loop, and a GA is used to
optimize the geometry of the cell. In this way, the performance
of the metamaterial-inspired antenna may be directly optimized
without separate consideration of the isolated antenna or unit
cell.
II. DESIGN PROCEDURE
It is shown in [11] that by properly arranging an array of SRRs
on the plane of an electrically small loop antenna, a layer of
MNG metamaterial can be created around the loop to provide an
impedance match to the loop antenna. The approach presented
here uses a single pixelated unit cell that is optimized at close
proximity to a loop antenna to produce an impedance match at
a frequency well below the initial resonance frequency of the
loop. The unit cell is a double-sided symmetrically pixelated
structure that has the symmetry of Fig. 1. The front of the cell is
first created using leftright symmetry. The front is then flipped

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76

IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

Fig. 2. Simulated and measured reflection coefficients. Inset shows the fabricated antenna without the ground plane.

Fig. 1. Optimized pixelated structure in close proximity to a loop antenna over

ground plane.

top to bottom to create the back side of the cell. This symmetry
is used to avoid the bianisotropy of MNG metamaterials.
The optimization procedure is based on the integration of
a full-wave solver (HFSS) with an optimization tool (GA)
written in Matlab. The geometries of the combined pixelated
cell and loop antenna are created in Matlab and exported to
HFSS for simulation. The reflection coefficient of the simulated
structure is then exported to the GA for post-processing and
optimization. The goal of the optimization is to determine a
metallization geometry that produces an acceptable impedance
match for the metamaterial-inspired loop antenna at a specific
frequency. Since the cell is parameterized as a pixelated grid,
its electrical characteristics can be altered by turning each pixel
ON (copper) or OFF (no copper). For given cell dimensions,
the number of unknowns and the number of possible geometries (pixel combinations) are determined by the pixelization
of the unit cell. In the example to follow, a cell with a total of
140 pixels on each side of the substrate is used. Because of
the assumed leftright symmetry, 140 pixels lead to a total of
, or over
possible solutions. Thus, an efficient binary
search algorithm such as a GA is needed to quickly find a pixel
combination that produces an acceptable impedance match.
The GA is configured for tournament selection with a twopoint crossover and self-evolving mutation probability. An initial population of 160 different pixel combinations is selected
randomly. For each pixel combination, an equivalent geometry
is generated, simulated in HFSS, and the corresponding fitness
is evaluated using the fitness function
(1)
Here,
is the complex reflection coefficient of the simulated
metamaterial-inspired antenna obtained from HFSS. Minimizing the fitness function (1) is thus equivalent to minimizing
the magnitude of the reflection coefficient, which translates to
an improved impedance match. Once all initial geometries have
been simulated and their fitnesses evaluated and ranked, the
best 25% are selected for mutation and crossover until a new
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population of 160 pixel combinations is generated and evaluated. This process is repeated until a fitness value of
dB or
lower is obtained or the maximum number of generations (set
to 100 in this example) is reached. When the optimization is
performed on a 3-GHz desktop computer with 3 Gb of RAM,
each iteration (HFSS simulation and fitness evaluation) requires
approximately 60 s.
III. RESULTS
In this section, the miniaturization of a loop antenna is
demonstrated by optimizing a pixelated cell in close proximity
mm, length
to a loop. A planar loop antenna of width
mm, and strip width 1.6 mm was designed using a
0.78-mm-thick Rogers 5880 duroid substrate with dielectric
constant 2.2 and loss tangent 0.0009. The pixelated cell was semm and a length
mm
lected to have a width
and parameterized as a pixelated grid with 140 square pixels
on each side of the substrate. Each pixel is 1.6 1.6 mm . The
gap between the cell and the loop antenna is 0.2 mm, and a
coaxial feed is used to feed the loop as shown in Fig. 1. The
overall dimensions of the metamaterial-inspired antenna are
22.4 21.5 mm . For comparison, a traditional loop of the
same dimensions was simulated using the same dielectric properties and found to be resonant at 2.45 GHz with an efficiency
of 99.2%. The metamaterial-inspired antenna was optimized
to resonate at 960 MHz, providing a 60% reduction in the
operating frequency over that of a traditional loop antenna.
Using the design methodology discussed above, a reflection
dB at 960 MHz was obtained in 12 generacoefficient of
tions, corresponding to a total of 1600 fitness evaluations and
a total run time of approximately 26 h. It should be noted that
at the end of the 12th generation, six different structures had
fitnesses less than
dB at 960 MHz, and over 60% of the
population had a fitness less than
dB, attesting to the good
performance of the present design methodology. The structure
dB) is shown in Fig. 1, and a plot of
with the lowest fitness (
its reflection coefficient as a function of frequency is shown in
Fig. 2. It can be seen from the reflection coefficient plot that the
optimized metamaterial-inspired antenna has a narrow
-dB
bandwidth of 0.6%. Such low bandwidth can be useful in wireless communication when used at the receiving end because it is
less prone to intermodulation noise [12]. An efficiency of 37.5%

OUEDRAOGO et al.: IN SITU OPTIMIZATION OF METAMATERIAL-INSPIRED LOOP ANTENNAS

Fig. 3. Simulated and Measured E plane pattern (dB).

and a peak directivity of 5.27 dB were obtained for the structure

of Fig. 1.
Although the efficiency of the conventional loop antenna is
significantly higher than that of the optimized antenna, the comparison is inappropriate due to the very different resonant frequencies (the conventional antenna cannot operate effectively at
960 MHz). It may be more useful to compare the performance
of the optimized antenna with a conventional loop also designed
to be resonant at 960 MHz. A conventional planar loop antenna
designed on the same substrate is resonant when the width is
mm and the length is
mm. Simulations of this
dB and
loop antenna produced a reflection coefficient of
an efficiency of 93% at 960 MHz. It is not surprising that the
efficiency of the conventional loop antenna is 2.5 times that of
the optimized antenna since the conventional antenna occupies
seven times the area. Also, since the metamaterial-inspired antenna was optimized only for the lowest reflection coefficient,
it is possible to improve its efficiency by trading off some of
the return loss. In fact, it was observed during the optimization process that some geometries that produce reflection codB also produce efficiencies as high
efficients of less than
as 44%. Therefore, performing an optimization where both reflection coefficient and efficiency are considered should lead to
designs with an appropriate balance between efficiency and return loss.
Plots of the simulated E-plane and H-plane patterns of the
metamaterial-inspired antenna are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. Both
the E-plane and H-plane patterns are nearly identical to the patterns of a typical small loop antenna, showing that the field patterns are not significantly altered by the presence of the unit cell.
A prototype of the metamaterial-inspired antenna shown in
Fig. 1 was fabricated through a photo-etching process using
a Rogers 5880 duroid substrate with the same properties and
dimensions as those used in the simulation. The measured reflection coefficient is shown in Fig. 2 along with the simulated
reflection coefficient. A comparison of the two plots shows a
very good match between simulation and measurement. Figs. 3
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77

Fig. 4. Simulated and Measured H plane pattern (dB).

Fig. 5. Relative permeability of the pixelated cell placed in a waveguide, extracted from simulation.

and 4 show the measured E-plane and H-plane patterns of the

prototype metamaterial-inspired antenna. A good match is seen
in Fig. 3 between the simulated and measured E-plane pattern.
The measured H-plane pattern (Fig. 4) is slightly different from
the simulated H-plane pattern, possibly due to fabrication errors
leading to a prototype with properties that are slightly different
from the simulated metamaterial-inspired antenna.
It was mentioned in Section I that if a metamaterial unit cell is
placed adjacent to an antenna to create a metamaterial-inspired
antenna, the resonance of the resulting antenna structure will be
different from the resonance of either the isolated antenna or a
metamaterial comprising an array of the unit cells. This was verified by simulating the pixelated unit cell of Fig. 1 in a WR1000
waveguide using HFSS. A material parameter extraction technique was used to obtain the real and imaginary values of the
relative permeability as a function of frequency [2], [13][15],
and the results are shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that the -resonance of the metamaterial comprising the pixelated unit cell
occurs at 941 MHz, whereas the resonance of the metamaterial-inspired antenna occurs at 960 MHz. The proposed in situ
technique allows the performance of the metamaterial-inspired
antenna to be optimized without directly considering the resonance properties of the unit cell.

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 9, 2010

IV. CONCLUSION
A new methodology is introduced for enhancing the performance of a loop antenna by optimizing a metamaterial unit cell
in close proximity to the antenna. Simulation and measurement
results show that this approach can be used to achieve a significant reduction in size while maintaining the same field patterns
as those of a typical small loop antenna. Future efforts will consider simultaneous optimization of antenna impedance and efficiency, and the development of gradient search algorithms to
reduce the optimization time.
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