Because of several good properties, such as, low cost, low power consumption and high data transmission rate, Ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna has been widely used in many fields.
With the development of wireless communication, a lot of UWB antennas have been presented by experts or scholars in recent years.
The conventional microstrip antenna with several noticeable characters, for instance, low-profile, light weight and easy-manufacture, obtains markedly development in recent years [1].
However, several defects, such as, narrow bandwidth, small power capacity, still exist in the conventional microstrip antenna, which restrict the development of UWB antenna. A U-shape slot microstrip antenna is presented in [2], but this kind of antenna owns relative narrow bandwidth. Besides, it is experimentally found that the operating bandwidth can be broadened by employing the broad slot as fractal shapes in Ref. [3]. However, with the increase of the number of iterations, manufacturing process of fractal antenna become more and more complex and fractal antenna tend to have lower gain. In Ref. [4], a small size bandwidth enhanced antenna by employing new-style material as substrate is first designed. Although bandwidth is broadened effective, but EBG structure in terms of fabrication is also more difficult than the metamaterial.
In fact, some special qualities, such as, negative dielectric constant, backward radiation, also exist in the metamaterials. These qualities of the metamaterials not relies on intrinsic structure, but bases on the periodical units. Several microstrip patch antennas by employing metamaterial units have been proposed to obtain broad impedance bandwidth and high gain in Refs. [5, 6]. Therefore, the metamaterial antennas are considered to have a good prospect in future use in practice [7].
In this paper, a novel chessboard-shaped antenna using meta-material units is first proposed. Physical photos of the proposed antenna with FR4 substrate are plotted in Figure 1, in which the antenna includes a chessboard-like top patch and a grid patterned ground plane. A detailed analysis will be shown for this novel antenna.