Enhanced Planar Antenna Efficiency Through Magnetic Thin-Films

This work proposes to use magnetic material as the substrate of planar antennas to overcome the platform effect caused by the conducting ground plane. The upper bound of the radiation efficiency of an electric-current-driven low-profile antenna is theoretically derived, which is inversely proportional to the Gilbert damping factor of the magnetic material. Meanwhile, the improvement of radiation due to the use of magnetic material is demonstrated by a three-dimensional (3D) multiphysics and multiscale time-domain model. The simulation is performed on an ideal, infinitely large planar electric radiator. The simulation results match the theoretical derivation, showing 25% radiation efficiency from a planar antenna backed by a FeGaB thin film with 2.56 μm thickness. Furthermore, for conductive ferromagnetic materials, it is shown that the eddy current loss can be well suppressed by laminating the thin film into multiple layers. The radiation efficiency of the modeled antenna with a conductive ferromagnetic substrate is improved from 2.2% to 11.8% by dividingthe substrate into 10 layers, with a ferromagnetic material fill factor of 93%.