Microstrip Patch Antenna Array

A Microstrip patch antenna in its simplest form consists of a radiating patch on one side of a dielectric substrate and a ground plane on the other side. The radiating patch and the feed lines are usually photo etched on the dielectric substrate. The patch is normally made of conducting material such as copper or gold and can take any possible shape. In order to simplify analysis and performance estimation, generally square, rectangular, circular, triangular, and elliptical or some other common shape patches are used for designing a microstrip antenna. In order to reduce the size of the microstrip patch antenna, substrates with higher dielectric constants must be used which are less efficient and result in narrow bandwidth. Hence a trade-off must be realized between the antenna performance and antenna dimensions. Microstrip patch antenna in wireless communication is gaining importance as a most powerful technological trend. ITS immense potential promises significant change in near term future of wireless application fields. current technological trend has focused much more attention towards Microstrip patch antenna has some advantages ( low cost, light weight, conformal & low profile), but it has little disadvantages too- like low gain, low efficiency, low directivity and narrow bandwidth. These disadvantages can be overcome by implementation of number of patch elements to form an array, improvement in performance is observed. In this review paper, performance characteristics for 2, 4, 8, 16 patch elements configured in 2*1, 2*2, 8*1 and 4*4 (respectively) array format has been analysed and compared.