Tutorial-Printing RF Antennas: From Materials, Printing process to Applications

Short bio:

George Xiao is an IEEE fellow, a fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada and a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He current works at the National Research Council Canada as a Principal Research Officer. Dr. Xiao has been developing materials and processes for printing electronics devices since 2012. Over the years he has developed high conductivity inks for antenna applications, low loss dielectric materials for mmWave antennas, stretchable conductive inks and dielectric inks. In addition, Dr. Xiao’s expertise covers multidisciplinary fields, including the IoT, flexible electronics, fiber optic sensor systems, RFID, sensor fusion and digital twins. Dr. Xiao was the recipient of the 2024 Career Excellence Award and the 2014 Technical Award by the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, the 2022 Gold Edison Award for Materials Breakthrough in the Category of Consumer Solutions, and the 2022 Research and Development 100 Awards for Process Innovation. Dr. Xiao was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification between 2017 and 2022, and an Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement between 2020 and 2021.

Abstract: Printed antennas, due to its low cost, a large variety of substrates and different form factors, is creating a new research field and complemented the traditional PCB based antennas for the deployment of 5G/6G communications, IoT, automatic driving, precision farming, smart cities, etc. The main types of applications include body centric communications, off body communications, human/animal body sensing/imaging, wireless power transfer, and flexible, or foldable, or conformable antennas for typical communication applications. Antenna printing is typically done using the printers, such as screen printing, inkjet printing, aerosol jet printing, on plastic films, papers, wood, fabrics, PCB and many other types of substrates using the conductive inks. 3-D printing has also been explored in recent years. The key material challenges are the low conductivity of the conductive inks and the dielectric loss of the substrate/superstrate materials. For metamaterial and/or multi-layer antennas (including the intelligent reflective surfaces (RIS)), printing resolutions, via printing, layer thickness control and the permittivity of the dielectric ink become critical. This talk overviews different types of the printing process and their advantages/disadvantages for antenna printing, requirements for the conductive inks and dielectric inks, and different types of substrate materials as well as their effects on the antenna performances. This talk further presents some of our work on the tackling of the low conductivity of the conductive inks; creations of the low loss dielectric materials, and the fabrications of single layer and multilayer metamaterial-based antenna/RIS. Application examples will be given in this talk including HF RFID printed antennas for sensing and ID applications; UHF RFID printed antennas for point of sales applications; printed microwave antennas for LEO satellite communications and sensing applications; printed frequency selective surfaces; printed meta-surfaces for millimeter wave radar sensing applications and communication applications.