Left Handed Metamaterial Design for Microstrip Antenna Application

Abstract

The speculation and invention of Left-Handed Meta Material (LH MTM) had sparked the interest of many researchers globally and was said to help increase the gain and directivity of the microstrip antenna. This paper discusses the design, simulation, fabrication and measurement of LH MTM in order to proof the claims. As of the structure design, the combination of the Square Rectangular Split Ring and the Thin Wire Structure was used for fabrication purposes on an FR-4 Board using the Wet Etching Technique. From the simulation, the gain of the antenna had increased to 1.2 dB while in the measurement, 2 dB and 4 dB of increment were observed in the maximum power received of the antenna for the E-Field and H- Field respectively. This had proven that the focusing effect of the LH MTM really enhance the gain of the antenna. On the other hand, the Return Loss (S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">11</sub> ) had improved by 9.62 dB and 12.29 dB in the simulation and measurement results respectively. Therefore, we could also conclude that LH MTM also contributed to the betterment of the matching of the antenna.