5.25 GHz Metamaterial Lens for Beam Focusing Applications

PCB antennas are an attractive and low-cost method for wireless transmissions. However, many of these designs produce low gain and low directivity. Introducing an array is a common solution to this but brings the complexity and cost of additional components as well as size constraints. An alternate approach to improving gain and directivity is to introduce a metamaterial lens placed above the antenna. This paper takes a Luneburg Lens design approach by adjusting the index of refraction of each cell in the lens. A realized gain improvement of 62% was achieved by adding 8.1mm of overall thickness to a stripline fed coupled patch antenna.