High-Gain Flexible Transparent Screen-Printed Quasi-Yagi Antenna for V-Band Applications

In this paper a flexible, V-band Quasi-Yagi-Uda antenna is presented. The antenna is implemented on a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$100 \mu$</tex> m thick Zeonex transparent flexible substrate using a reliable screen-printing process. The antenna design is optimized to operate over 47.2 to 48.2 GHz frequency bands for emerging Vband applications. Measurements and simulations show a good agreement. The maximum measured peak gain is 10.4 dB at 47.2 GHz and the realized gain is higher than 8 dB over the frequency band of interest. A good input impedance matching is achieved in the 46.7 to 49.2 GHz frequency band.The antenna size does not exceed 15 mm by 20 mm. To further decrease the side lobe level in the E-plane, an optimization technique on the ground plane is also proposed as part of this work. The achieved performances demonstrate the feasibility of high-gain screen-printed end-fire antennas on transparent flexible at the millimeter-wave frequency range.