Printed Antenna Designs Using Defected Ground Structures: A Review Of Fundamentals And State-of-the-art Developments

Abstract

Deliberately created defects in the form of etchedout patterns on the ground plane of microstrip circuits and transmission lines have been familiar to microwave engineers for a long time, although their applications to the antennas are relatively new. The term Defected Ground Structure (DGS), specifically implies a single or very limited number of defects. The antenna designers initially employed DGS underneath printed feed lines to suppress higher harmonics. During 2005- 2006, DGS was directly integrated with antennas to improve the radiation characteristics and to suppress mutual coupling between adjacent elements. Since then, the DGS techniques have been explored extensively and have led to many possible applications. Over 1200 technical papers, three book chapters, and several granted patents on ‘antennas with DGS’, produced in a short span of last eight years, are a measure of the potential of this technique. The objective of this work is aimed to address the topic in a comprehensive way, to provide a chronology of the research and innovations, to offer an insight of the technology, and to review the state-of-the-art advances in the area of DGS.