under grant no. RG-39-135-40. The authors, therefore, acknowledge with thanks to DSR technical and financial support.

In this paper, a compact planar ultrawideband (UWB) antenna and an antenna array setup for microwave breast imaging are presented. The proposed antenna is constructed with a slotted semicircular-shaped patch and partial trapezoidal ground. It is compact in dimension: 0.30λ × 0.31λ × 0.011λ, where λ is the wavelength of the lowest operating frequency. For design purposes, several parameters are assumed and optimized to achieve better performance. The prototype is applied in the breast imaging scheme over the UWB frequency range 3.10–10.60 GHz. However, the antenna achieves an operating bandwidth of 8.70 GHz (2.30–11.00 GHz) for the reflection coefficient under–10 dB with decent impedance matching, 5.80 dBi of maximum gain with steady radiation pattern. The antenna provides a fidelity factor (FF) of 82% and 81% for face-to-face and side-by-side setups, respectively, which specifies the directionality and minor variation of the received pulses. The antenna is fabricated and measured to evaluate the antenna characteristics. A 16-antenna array-based configuration is considered to measure the backscattering signal of the breast phantom where one antenna acts as transmitter, and 15 of them receive the scattered signals. The data is taken in both the configuration of the phantom with and without the tumor inside. Later, the Iteratively Corrected Delay and Sum (IC–DAS) image reconstructed algorithm was used to identify the tumor in the breast phantom. Finally, the reconstructed images from the analysis and processing of the backscattering signal by the algorithm are illustrated to verify the imaging performance.

We introduce a practical dielectric metasurface design for microwave frequencies. The metasurface is made of an array of dielectric resonators held together by dielectric connections thus avoiding the need of a mechanical support in the form of a dielectric slab and the spurious multiple reflections that such a slab would generate. The proposed design can be used either for broadband metasurface applications or monochromatic wave transformations. The capabilities of the concept to manipulate the transmission phase and amplitude of the metasurface are supported by numerical and experimental results. Finally, a half-wave plate and a quarter-wave plate have been realized with the proposed concept.

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This paper discusses the electromagnetic (EM) signature of Arabic alphabets that can be considered as standards particles to form chipless tags. Normalized Arial font is suited as example but the method can be applied for any other font. The letters are realized by metallic strips or better, by conductive ink. All the 28 letters have been simulated and their EM signatures for both field polarizations are extracted. It is demonstrated that combining vertical and horizontal responses allow the identification of letters without ambiguity. Moreover, the case of letter with punctuation (one to three points) is considered in more details. Indeed, we propose to modify very slightly these letters by connecting the points to the body of the letters. This connection is made by a unique straight and very thin strip. Under this modification these letters exhibit more exploitable signatures. Finally, a lookup table for identification of the 28 letters is carried out.

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A printed antenna has been designed based on two‐dimensional image of a fractal‐jet fluid. The numerical analysis performed with HFSS software has reported multiband resonances over the frequency band 1–20 GHz. Experimental characterization in terms of impedance matching, bandwidth, gain, and radiation patterns over the band 1–6 GHz has shown a unique electromagnetic response of the antenna allowing it to be used as a chipless RFID tag for security applications. Details on the antenna design, numerical, and experimental results are presented and discussed. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:75–82, 2016