An UWB Coplanar Waveguide Fed Integrated IFA Design for Wearable Communications

Abstract

An UWB CPW-fed Integrated "IFA-like" design is proposed. The new design has a much longer short-ended arm and a much narrower gap between the radiating arms and the coplanar ground plane. The bandwidth increase is achieved thanks to the superposition of multi-resonances induced by the joint effects of a strong coupling between the radiating arms and the ground plane and the excitation of both even and odd CPW modes in the feedline. The design has been tested for two types of substrate, FR4 and denim, for which-10 dB bandwidths of more than 60 % and 87 % are achieved respectively. Body proximity effects are analysed for the denim IIFA by simulation. It shows that the antenna remains working well in the presence of human body thanks to its UWB feature. This extremely simple, lowprofile and easily integrable UWB IIFA-like design can be used for wearable communications (on-body/off-body), supporting multi-standards.