Design and measurement of a flexible implantable stripline-fed slot antenna for biomedical applications

Abstract

A novel design of a stripline-fed flexible implantable antenna is proposed in this paper. The specialty of this antenna is its small design compared to the previous antennas of similar type. The antenna presented in this paper is designed to operate in the Industrial, Scientific and medical (ISM) band, (2.4-2.4835 GHz). The thickness of the antenna is only 0.887mm, meaning this antenna can easily be subjected to bent conditions. The whole strip line fed antenna is embedded inside a silicon layer of 0.443mm, resulting in an overall packed dimension of 10.125mm × 8.728mm × 1.505mm. The antenna was then placed inside a human tissue model before simulating it in CST Microwave studio. All the performance parameters of the antenna was measured and evaluated in both planar and bent conditions. Finally, the antenna was fabricated and SMA female connecter was used as the port of the antenna. Performance measurements were then taken using a Network analyzer and were compared with the simulated results.