A Compact Staircase Rectangular Microstrip Patch Antenna for Microwave Imaging Applications

Abstract A Staircase monopole antenna with microstrip line feed for improved bandwidth and high gain. The etching of staircase steps at the bottom and the top of the rectangular patch antenna improves the impedance matching both at lower and at high frequencies. The implementation of the slots at the top of the patch and the ground plane leads to an improved bandwidth ratio of 5.875: 1. The overall size of the proposed antenna is 72 x 63 x 1.588 mm3, and it has multiple resonances at 2GHz, 4 GHz, 5.8GHz and 7.4 GHz. A fractional bandwidth of 141% is achieved for the return loss of less than -10 dB. The antenna accomplishes a gain of 5.87 dBi. The monopole antenna detects the presences of tumor location from the skin layer of the human breast model.