Wideband Antenna and Wideband Bandpass Filter for Wearable Systems

Shanshan Gao, 1Shaoqiu Xiao, 1Bing-Zhong Wang and 1,2Xinhe Xu

1. Institute of Applied Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China 2. Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang 330063, China Abstract- With the rapid development in wearable systems in recent years, the need for wireless communication components integrated into clothing is increasing. Wearable antennas and radio frequency (RF) devices are faced with a considerable design challenge, especially in the gains of antennas and performances of filters. This paper presents a wearable antenna and a wearable bandpass filter for ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. The antenna is composed of a coneshaped patch, a coplanar waveguide (CPW) ground, and several uniform semi-ring slots. The slots can improve the gain of the antenna and had no significant effect on the bandwidth. The filter is constituted of a modified stepped impedance resonator (SIR), two identical feed-lines, and a CPW ground. Simulation was accomplished using Ansoft HFSS and CST Microwave Studio, both simulated results are presented and they are in good agreement. I. INTRODUCTION the back of the patches, they were not suitable for integrating with clothing or other devices. In this paper, we propose a wideband antenna and a wideband bandpass filter that can be worn within clothing for UWB applications. The proposed antenna and filter can be manufactured from flexible materials and easily hidden into clothing. The new structure of the antenna is composed of a cone-shaped patch, a coplanar waveguide (CPW) ground, and several uniform semi-ring slots on the patch and ground. The semi-ring slots can improve the gain of the antenna without influence the performance of the antenna. And we use CPWfed can make the antenna easily integrate with other devices. The simulated results show that the antenna has a wide bandwidth from 5.76 to 10.93 GHz with return loss less than 13 dB. The wearable bandpass filter is constituted of a modified stepped impedance resonator (SIR), two identical feed-lines, and a CPW ground. It showed high performance in the passband. And the -3 dB bandwidth of the filter is from 2.76 to 8.32 GHz with return loss less than -10 dB. The antenna and filter are very suitable for being implemented on clothes.

With body-centric communication systems becoming more and more important in medical and military, wearable electronic devices have attracted much attention [1]. Antennas and filters are two of the important components in a bodycentric communication system. A significant challenge of antennas and filters is presented. The requirement for antennas and filters with high performances which can be worn on the body has been driving. Until now, many researchers have explored various wearable antennas. Whereas few research focused on the wearable filters. Wearable antenna could be made of textiles [2], or made as a button integrated into clothing [3]. Some researches had reported single frequency band wearable antennas with good performances [4-5]. Then, dual band antennas had been explored [6-7]. Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) wearable antenna is becoming popular in body-centric communication systems since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the frequency rang from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz for commercial communication applications. UWB communication can provides low power operation, low radiated power, and high date rate. Thereby, it is seen as an appropriate technology to be used in body-centric communication systems. In [8] a button antenna for UWB communication systems was proposed. The antenna showed good performances, however the dimension of the antenna was larger than ordinary buttons. Wearable half-disk antennas were designed in [9], the bandwidths of these antennas covered 3.1-10.6 GHz and showed good return loss characteristics. However, the grounds of the antennas were on

Fig.1. Proposed wideband wearable antenna

II. ANTENNA DESIGN To design wearable antennas and filters, suitable textile materials should be chosen at first. In our design, the substrate used here is a nonconducting textile material named felt which mentioned in [10]. The felt material is 1.1 mm thick with relative dielectric constant H r =1.38 and loss tangent 0.02.

978-1-4244-5708-3/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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Other components such as patch, ground and feed-lines are made from electro copper foil which has a good conductivity. Fig. 1 shows the layout of the proposed wearable antenna and relevant parameters are given in the caption. The antenna is composed of a cone-shaped patch, a CPW ground and several uniform semi-ring slots on both the patch and the ground.
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the condition that the antenna with and without slots in Fig. 3. From these curves we can distinctly see that at lower frequency, there is little difference between the two antennas. When the frequency increasing, there is a great difference in the gains between the two antennas. It can be easily found that the gains of the antenna with semi-ring slots are higher than the antenna without semi-ring slots as frequencies rising.
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The cone-shaped patch and the CPW ground can work together to realize a wideband antenna, and we used CPW-fed instead of microstrip-fed [11] has the advantage of easily integrating into clothing or other components. The semi-ring slots on the cone-shaped patch and the ground can increase the gain of the antenna and have no significant effect on the bandwidth and return loss of the antenna. Fig. 2 illustrates the return losses of this antenna with and without semi-ring slots under the condition that other parameters of the antenna are not changed. It can be seen from this figure that there is little influence on the bandwidth and return loss of the antenna. Nevertheless, the gain of the antenna is increased when there are some semi-ring slots on both the patch and the ground. In order to explain this more clearly, we plot the gain curves of the antenna as the diversification of the frequencies both on

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(h) Fig.5. Simulated radiation patterns (a) E-Plane at 6.5 GHz (b) H-Plane at 6.5 GHz (c) E-Plane at 8.9 GHz (d) H-Plane at 8.9 GHz (e) E-Plane at 9.9 GHz (f) H-Plane at 9.9 GHz (g) E-Plane at 10 GHz (h) H-Plane at 10 GHz

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We set the radius of the outer semi-ring and the radius of the inner semi-ring as r1 , r 2 , respectively. The dimensions of the antenna are as follows: W1=5.5 mm, W2=6.1 mm, W3=22.75 mm, W4=6.75 mm, L1=10.2 mm, L2=5.5 mm, L3=16.9 mm, L4=13.3 mm, L5=1 mm, L6=24.5 mm, d1=0.5 mm, d2=8.25 mm, d3=0.5 mm, d4=6.5 mm, d5=5.5 mm, d6=6.5 mm, r1 =5 mm, and r 2 =4mm. Simulation was accomplished with Ansoft HFSS and CST Microwave Studio. Fig. 4 shows the two simulated S parameters of the proposed antenna. It can be seen from this

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figure, the simulated bandwidth of Ansoft HFSS is from 5.76 to 10.93 GHz. While, the results accomplished by CST, the bandwidth can be observed from 5.1 to 11.1 GHz. Over the whole band, both the return losses are less than -13 dB. The simulated results are in good agreement. Radiation patterns simulated by Ansoft HFSS in the two principle planes are plotted in Fig. 5 at frequency 6.5 GHz, 8.9 GHz, 9.9 GHz, and 10 GHz, respectively.
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and several uniform semi-ring slots. The antenna realizes sufficient -10 dB bandwidth from 5.76 to 10.93 GHz. And the radiation patterns of the antenna are also good. The wearable bandpass filter is constituted of a modified SIR, two identical feed-lines, and a CPW ground. The filter shows the -3 dB bandwidth from 2.76 to 8.32 GHz and exhibits good performance within the passband. The antenna and filter can be embedded on clothing, and they are very suitable for wearable systems. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Project supported partially by the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2009AA01Z231), partially by the New-century Talent Program of the Education Department of China (Grant No. NCET070154), partially by Foundation of National Key Laboratory of Millimeter Wave (Grant No. K200809), and partially by the national natural science foundation of China (Grant No. 60872034).

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Fig.7. Simulated results of CST Microwave Studio and Ansoft HFSS [1]

REFERENCES
M. Billinghurst and T. Starner, Wearable devices: new ways to manage informance, Computer, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 57-64, Jan. 1999. [2] L. Liu, S. Zhu, and R. Langley, Dual-band triangular patch antenna with modified ground plane, IET Electronics Letters, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 140-141, Feb., 2007. [3] B. Sanz-Izquierdo, F. Huang, and J. C. Batchelor, Convert dual band wearable button antenna, IET Electronics Letters, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 668-670, Jun., 2006. [4] A. Tronquo, H. Rogier, C. Hertleer, and L. Van Langenhove, Robust planar textile antenna for wireless body LANs operating in 2.45 GHz ISM band, IET Electronics Letters, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 142-143, Feb., 2006. [5] G. A. Conway, and W. G. Scanlon, Low-profile patch antennas for over-body-surface communication at 2.45 GHz, IWAT 07 International Workshop, pp. 416-419, 2007. [6] P. Salonen, J. Kim, and Y. Rahmat-Samii, Dual-band E-shaped patch wearable textile antenna, IEEE Proc. AP-S, Washington, DC, USA, 2005. [7] S. Zhu and R. Langley, Dual-band wearable antennas over EBG substrate, IET Electronics Letters, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 141-142, Feb., 2007. [8] B. Sanz-Izquierdo, F. Huang, J. C. Batchelor, and M. Sobhy, Compact antenna for WLAN on body applications, Proc. Of the 36th European Microwave Conference, pp. 815-818, Sep., 2006. [9] T. Yang, W. Davis, and W. Stutzman, Wearable ultra-wideband halfdisk antennas, Proc. IEEE Antennas Propagation Soc. Int. Symp., vol. 3A, pp. 500-503, Jul., 2005. [10] S. Zhu and R. Langley, Dual-band wearable textile antenna on an EBG substrate, IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propagation, vol. 57, no. 4, pp. 926-935, Apr., 2009. [11] P. Salonen, Y. Rahmat-Samii, H. Hurme, and M. Kivikoski, Dual-band wearable textile antenna, Proc. Antennas Propagation Soc. Int. Symp., vol. 1, pp. 463-466, Jun. 2004. [12] Shanshan Gao, Shaoqiu Xiao, Jianpeng Wang, Xuesong Yang, and Bing-Zhong Wang, A wideband microstrip bandpass filter for ultrawideband wireless communication application, Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 1975-1976, Aug., 2007.

III. FILTER DESIGN The proposed wearable bandpass filter is shown in Fig. 6. It is composed of a modified SIR, two identical feed-lines, and a CPW ground. The modified SIR is symmetrical. It is constituted with two identical high impedance lines at the two sides and a low impedance line in the center. The modified SIR can not only maintain the multiple-mode resonator property but also easily realize a tight coupling with the feedlines in order to achieve a wide passband [12]. The feed-lines used here can also tighten the coupling between itself and the modified SIR. The CPW ground can make the filter easily integrate with clothing or other devices. The dimensions of the filter are as follows: W1=3.9 mm, W2=0.3 mm, W3=3.9 mm, L1=13 mm, L2=5.6 mm, L3=12.1 mm, L4=12.7 mm, d1=0.6 mm, d2=0.1 mm, d3=0.8 mm, and d4=0.3 mm. The width of the high impedance lines of the modified SIR is W2. We show the simulated S-parameters of the filter in Fig. 7. The results of the two simulators are matched well. Both of the return losses are less than -10 dB within the passband. Overall, the filter is very suitable for wearable systems. IV. CONCLUSION A compact wearable antenna and a wearable bandpass filter for UWB applications have been proposed in this paper. The antenna is constituted of a cone-shaped patch, a CPW ground,

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