Deeply Implanted Conformal Antenna for Real-Time Bio-Telemetry Applications.

The design and experimental verification of a deeply implanted conformal printed antenna is presented. The hip implant acts as the ground plane for a coaxial-cable-fed trapezoidal radiator designed to transmit biological signals collected within the body by proper biosensors. The arrangement, consisting of a metallic (or equivalent) hip implant, bio-compatible gypsum-based dielectric, and conformal radiator, was tested when the hosting 3D-printed plastic bone was immersed in tissue-like liquid contained in a plastic bucket. The dimensions of the set-up are similar to a human leg. Matching and radiation characteristics are presented in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band (2.4-2.5 GHz), showing the feasibility of the proposed arrangement.

Design and Experimental Validation of a Switchable Frequency Selective Surface with Incorporated Control Network.

Tunable/switchable devices are more and more required in modern communication systems. However, the realization of the tuning requires the presence of active devices, which in turn must be biased. The current paper comes up with a solution for designing and experimentally validating such a switchable Frequency Selective Surface. Two different metallic structures are simulated and measured, having incorporated the same topology control network (CN). In this scenario, the main innovation of this paper is the presence of the feeding part, namely the control network. In this work, the main FSS structure is flanked by three parallel CN microstrip lines and several via holes that allow biasing the active elements, namely PIN diodes. The switchability of the proposed structure is achieved through PIN diodes, whose bias determines the values of the elements in the equivalent circuit. At different biases, the response of the FSS changes accordingly. From all possible values of the bias, the extreme cases when the diodes act as (almost) short- and open-circuits are considered in the submitted manuscript for the sake of brevity. These cases are modeled by the main and cut-slot structures, respectively. The proposed structures have been evaluated using electromagnetic simulation and implemented on an FR4 substrate having a thickness of 1.58 mm. With the periodicity of the square-shaped unit cell of 18 mm edge length, different filtering bands are obtained below 12 GHz. Another novelty that has received very little consideration in the existing literature is the use of a finite array of unit cells instead of an infinite one. And finally, tests in an anechoic chamber have proved that there is a good agreement between practical and simulation results and also demonstrated the proper performance of the devices for wide angular incidence for both TE and TM polarizations.

Deep neural learning based optimization for automated high performance antenna designs.

The present paper introduces an optimization-oriented method here practiced for designing high performance single antennas in a fully automated environment. The proposed method comprises two sequential major steps. The first one devotes configuring the shape of antenna and determining the feeding point by employing the bottom-up optimization (BUO) method. In this algorithm, the number of microstrip transmission lines (TLs) used to model the radiator is increased consecutively and the shape of the antenna is revised up to finding the initial satisfying results. Secondly, for determining the best design parameters of the configured antenna shape in the first step (i.e., width and length of TLs), deep neural network (DNN) that is based on Thompson sampling efficient multi-objective optimization (TSEMO) is applied. The recommended optimization method is successfully attracted as a problem solver for designers to tackle the subject for antenna design such as the complexity and large dimensions of structures. Hence, the main advantage of the implemented optimization method in this article is to noticeably decrease the required designer's involvement automatically generating valid layouts. For validating the suggested method, two wideband antennas are designed, prototyped and subjected to experiment. The first optimized antenna covers the frequency band 8.8-10.1 GHz (43 % bandwidth) characterized by a maximum gain of 7.13 dB while the second one covers the frequency band 11.3-13.16 GHz (47.5 %) which exhibits a maximum gain of 7.8 dB.