Single-Layer Wideband Circularly Polarized Antenna Using Non-Uniform Metasurface for C-band Applications

A single-layer design of non-uniform metasurface (MS) based circularly polarized (CP) antenna with wideband operation characteristic is proposed and investigated in this paper. The antenna is excited by a truncated corner squared patch as a primary radiating CP source. Then, a non-uniform MS is placed in the same layer with the driven patch. Besides increasing the impedance bandwidth, the non-uniform MS also generates two additional CP bands in the high frequency band, leading to significantly increase the antenna’s overall performances. The use of non-uniform MS distinguishes our design from the other CP MS based antennas in literature, in which the MS is formed by multiple uniform unit cells and placed in different layer with the radiating element. For validation, an antenna prototype, whose overall dimensions of 0.94 λ o × 0.94 λ o × 0.06 λ o at the center operating frequency, is fabricated and experimentally tested. The measured operating bandwidth with |S 11 | ≤ −10 dB and AR ≤ 3 dB is 27.1% (5.1–6.7 GHz) and the broadside gain within this band is from 5.7 to 7.2 dBic. Compared to the other related works, the proposed antenna has advantage of very wideband operation with single-layer design.