Fully Printed and Electrically Small Folded Dipole with Inherent Matching

A highly miniaturized fully printed folded dipole antenna suitable for narrowband applications has been designed. The input impedance of the antenna was engineered by varying the loading reactances in order to achieve inherent matching with respect to a given source impedance. Additionally, compared to a discrete lumped implementation, the printed topology allows realization of slightly larger bandwidth, however at the expense of radiation efficiency. The designed miniaturized antenna was fabricated and validated using measurements.