Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using

CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

A reader is a radio frequency (RF) transmitter and receiver, controlled by a microprocessor or digital signal processor. The
reader, using an attached antenna, captures data from tags then passes the data to a computer for processing. Here the
design flow of a patch RFID-antenna for frequency range: 908.5 - 914 MHz (RFID band of Korea) using CST MWS is
described. This article is published with the permission and courtesy of Prof. Bierng-Chearl Ahn and his colleagues at
Chungbuk University, Korea.

Figure 1 shows the proposed structure of the antenna and the design parameters.

Figure 1: Deasign parameters of RFID-antenna.

The design parameters define the operation and the performance of the antenna. The operating frequency determines the size
of the patch antenna: W L = 0.4 , while truncation t / W, as well as vertical height of the ground plane, the axial ratio. The
ground plane size controls the gain of the antenna while the distance between ground plane and the patch affects the
bandwidth. On the other hand, the size of the feed gap influences the impedance matching. The geometry was drawn and the
parameters of the antenna optimized through simulations performed in CST MWS. Figure 2 whows the CST MWS model of
the patch antenna, the final design parameters and the manufactured antenna.

Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

© 2010 CST AG - http://www.cst.com Page 1 of 5
Figure 2: The geometry of the patch antenna seen in CST MWS together with fabricated one.

The measurements were made and compared with the simulations. The plots of the reflection coefficient and the gain are
shown in Figure 3. It can be seen that the measurement results agree with the simulations very well.

Figure 3: Comparison results between measured and simulated values. All simulations were performed in CST
MWS.

The patch antenna was further miniaturized by placing dielectric material between the patch and the ground. The simulated
and consequently fabricated miniaturized antenna can be seen in Figure 4 with the final design parameters.

Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

© 2010 CST AG - http://www.cst.com Page 2 of 5
Figure 4: RFID patch antenna miniaturized by dielectric loading.

The simulations are compared to the measurements in Figure 5. It can be seen that with the dielectric between patch and the
ground, the better resonance at frequency of 900 MHz can be achieved.

Figure 5: Simulation and measurement results for the antenna with dielectric.

As the last step the gain was increased via designing 2-Element SFADP Array. First, the distance between elements was
optimized using CST MWS in order to obtain maximum gain. After that the feeding network and power divider circuit (Figure 6)
were designed.

Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

© 2010 CST AG - http://www.cst.com Page 3 of 5
Figure 6: Feeding network and power divider.

The antenna array was manufactured and measured. The comparison plots between measurements and simulations can be
seen in Figure 7 and 8.

Figure 7: Performance of the designed antenna.

Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

© 2010 CST AG - http://www.cst.com Page 4 of 5
Figure 8: Performance of the designed antenna: axial ratio.

In this article three RFID reader antennas were designed using CST MWS. Measurements of the fabricated antennas show
good agreement with simulated results.

Design of Circularly-Polarized Patch Antennas using CST MICROWAVE STUDIO®

© 2010 CST AG - http://www.cst.com Page 5 of 5