Silver Ink Printed Logarithmic Spiral Antenna

Innovative manufacturing processes based on printing technology are gaining in importance and already evolve to a key technology for electrical components. In this paper we compare a broadband antenna design in the high frequency regime from 1 GHz to 8 GHz. One antenna was designed and fabricated on a copper coated printed circuit board based on a conventional wet etching process and two antennas of equal design were fabricated with a silver ink-based printing process. Typical antenna parameters such as reflection coefficient, realized antenna gain, and radiation pattern were investigated for the performance comparison of the two different manufacturing techniques. Frequency dependent deviations in impedance matching were found as well as a reduced antenna gain behavior over the entire frequency band of the silver ink printed antennas. The greatest and frequency dependent deviations are at low frequencies from 1 GHz to 2 GHz and at higher frequencies starting at 6 GHz. Between these frequency regimes the observed deviations are comparably constant over frequency.