Optimal Planar Electric Dipole Antenna

TL;DR

This paper evaluates optimized planar meander line antennas against fundamental physical bounds, showing they achieve minimal radiation Q-factor but fall short on efficiency, and compares their performance with other antenna designs.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous comparison of simple antenna designs to physical bounds, highlighting their strengths and limitations in efficiency and bandwidth.

Findings

Meander line antennas meet the lower bound on radiation Q-factor.

They are far from the efficiency bounds.

Comparison with other designs offers insights into antenna performance limits.

Abstract

Considerable time is often spent optimizing antennas to meet specific design metrics. Rarely, however, are the resulting antenna designs compared to rigorous physical bounds on those metrics. Here we study the performance of optimized planar meander line antennas with respect to such bounds. Results show that these simple structures meet the lower bound on radiation Q-factor (maximizing single resonance fractional bandwidth), but are far from reaching the associated physical bounds on efficiency. The relative performance of other canonical antenna designs is compared in similar ways, and the quantitative results are connected to intuitions from small antenna design, physical bounds, and matching network design.