Design of an implantable miniaturized meander line antenna for biomedical telemetry

Abstract

This paper presents an electrically small meander line antenna fed by slot line transmission line. The antenna is designed for bio-medical telemetry where it operates at the Medical Implant Communication Band. Silicon substrate of high resistivity is used as a substrate. The dimensions of the antenna are λ0/75-by λ0/75. In this study, the three-layer (skin/fat/muscle) model is used to simulate human's body. The antenna is assumed to be located at the middle of the muscle layer. The optimized antenna has the following characteristics: it has 160 MHz bandwidth around the center frequency 400 MHz. The antenna has -36.54 dBi gain. This low gain is attributed to the human body losses in addition to the small electrical size of the antenna.