Design of Dual-Band Transparent Antenna By Using Nano-Structured

Thin Film Coating Technology

Yu-Ming Lin 1, Hung-Wei Wu 2, Tzu-Chun Tai 1, Cheng-Yuan Hung 4, Shoou-Jinn Chang 1, 3 and
Yeong-Her Wang 1, 3
1
Department of Photonics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
2
Department of Computer and Communication, Kun Shan University, Tainan, Taiwan.
3
Advanced Optoelectronic Technology Center, Institute of Microelectronics, Department of Electrical Engineering, National
Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
4
Medical Devices and Opto-Electronics Equipment Department, Metal Industries Research & Development Center, Taiwan.

Abstract—In this paper, we proposed the dual-band transparent

antenna by using nano-structured thin film coating technology for
GPS/Wi-Fi applications. The proposed nano-structured thin film
structure is based on “activation” process in the fabrication flow.
The activation process will transfer the nano-structure of thin film
from disorder to order arrangement. Therefore, the coated thin
film is having the characteristic of high transmittance and low re-
sistivity. The proposed antenna has an operating bandwidth is
found to be 1420 - 1720 MHz and 5290 - 6030 MHz. The transpar-
ent dual-band antenna can apply on the applications of 3Cs, wear- (a)
able devices, and cars.
Index Terms—transparency, thin film, GPS/Wi-Fi antenna

I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, the developments of many different wireless com-
(b)
munications standards, it is desirable to integrate as many
standards such as the global positioning system (GPS) and Fig. 1. (a) Configuration and (b) photograph of the proposed dual-band antenna.
wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) standards as possible into a single (L1 = 9, L2 = 30, L3 = 76, W1 = 14, W2 = 9, g1 = 2, g2 = 2, g3 = 1, h = 1.1, all are
wireless device. Many transparent antennas have been reported in mm).
because it carries a lot of advantage to the wireless communi-
cation developments especially it allows the transmission of
electric currents while and the optically visible transparency
[3]-[5]. In [3], the design of a novel chip-less radio frequency
identification (RFID) tag, which is inkjet-printed on a polyi-
mide substrate, is presented. In [4], an optically transparent
dual-band multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) antenna de-
signed using a micro-metal mesh conductive (MMMC) film for
the wireless local area network applications. In [5], an optically
transparent antenna which is made of conductive AgHT coated
film was proposed. However, these studies are limited in the
literature and very hard to going to the business way. This can
be due to difficulty of fabrication, lossy nature, ultra-high cost
and low efficiency of the transparent materials.
In this paper, we proposed the nano-structured thick film
coating technology. The activation process can effectively im-
prove the nano-structure arrangement inside the thin film from
disorder to order in around 3 mins treatment so as to appropriate
to fabricate the high transparent and high-performance antenna.
The proposed transparent antenna can apply on the applications
of 3Cs, wearable devices, and cars.
Fig. 2. Fabrication process flow of the antenna.

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 Fig. 5. Simulated and measured results of the transparent antennas with a 50-Ω
port.

Fig. 3. (a) Disordered nano-structure arrangement without using activation pro-

cess and (b) ordered nano-structure with using invented activation process.

Fig. 6. Measured radiation efficiency and gain of the antenna.

Fig. 4. Optical image of the nano-structured thin film by using activation pro-
cess. (a) 100Hz (case 1), (b) 1KHz (case 2), (c) 1MHz (case 3) and (d) 16MHz TABLE I TRANSMITTANCE AND RESISTIVITY OF THE THIN FILM WITH DIFFER-
(case 4) at 20 Vp-p. ENT FREQUENCY IN THE ACTIVATION PROCESS

Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4

II. DESIGN OF TRANSPARENT ANTENNA
Transmittance
Fig. 1 shows the configuration and photograph of the pro- 55 60 72 83
(%)
posed dual-band antenna. The antenna is designed and fabri-
Resistivity
cated on the glass substrate (Corning Eagle XG; dielectric con- 0.196 0.132 8.34 15.2
stant εr = 5.27, loss tangent δ = 0.003 and thickness h = 1.1 mm). (10-3 Ω-cm)
The developed thin film material has very low sheet resistance
(Rs = 5 Ω/sq) after using our invented activation process. Fig.
2 shows the fabrication process flow of the antenna. The corn- and ordered nano-structure with using invented activation pro-
ing glass substrate was cleaned at the first step by using a stand- cess. Fig. 4 shows the optical image of the nano-structured thin
ard RCA cleaning technique. film by using activation process with different frequency.
The wet film layer, 205.7-μm-thick, was coating by using In the activation process, two factors are important as fre-
manual bar coating blade the nano-structured thin film/corning quency and potential of electrical field (10 – 20 Vp-p). The fre-
glass substrate. To define the configuration of antenna, a mask quency was set as 100Hz, 100KHz, 1MHz and 16MHz. The
was patterned the Heat-resistant tape, 60-μm-thick. In this pro- heating was controlled at 100 ƱC with 5 mins maintain. The ex-
cess, through activation nano-structured thin film onto the sur- posed nano-structured thin film layer (1-μm -thick) was re-
face on the corning glass. Fig. 3 shows the optical image of the moved by physical process. Table I summarized the transmit-
nano-structured thin film. It is obviously that the disordered tance and resistivity of the thin film with different frequency in
nano-structure arrangement without using activation process the activation process.

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 TABLE II COMPARISONS WITH OTHER PROPOSED TRANSPARENT ANTENNA

Sub- Efficiency Gain

Ref. f0 (GHz) |S11| (dB)
strate (%) (dB)

[7] PET 6.8 15 10 -2

[8] PET 1.2 11 20 -4

Polyi-
[9] 1.26 35 53.79 1.66
mide
[10] PET 5.8 21 X -8.2

This Corning 1.55 / 29 / 14.8 / -9.36 /

Fig. 7. The relationship between transmittance and resistivity
of the thin film with different film thicknesses.
(a)
work glass 5.74 14.8 30.8 -7.04
GHz shows good agreement with the simulated result. The
slight diversity in the measured and simulated results is due to
the relative boundary conditions of the simulation and measure-
ment process. Efficiency, gain, and radiation pattern measure-
ments of the fabricated prototypes tested on SATIMO antenna
measurement equipment, StarLab. Fig. 6 shows the measured
radiation efficiency and gain of the antenna. Fig. 7. Shows the
relationship between transmittance and resistivity at different
film thicknesses. Fig. 8 shows simulated and measured radia-
tion pattern of the proposed antennas at 1550 MHz and 5740
MHz. The radiation pattern of the antenna is having the gain
achieving at -9.63 and -7.04 dB. Table II summarized the com-
parison of previous works and our proposed method.

(b)
Fig. 8. (a) Simulation and (b) measurement of radiation pat-
tern of the antennas at 1550 MHz and 5740 MHz
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the high transparent dual-band antenna for
GPS/Wi-Fi applications has been presented. The proposed
nano-structured thin film structure is based on “activation” pro-
cess in the fabrication flow for achieving the thin films with
high transmittance and low resistivity. The invented activation
process can transfer the nano-structured thin film from disor-
dered to ordered arrangement, therefore, the high transmittance
and low resistivity thin film can be achieved. The measured re-
turn loss shows the fractional bandwidth of 18%. The proposed
antenna with an overall size of 100 x 25 mm2. The transparent
antenna has very high potential to apply on the applications of
3Cs, wearable devices, and cars.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and
The antenna was measured by an Agilent N5230A. The an- Technology under Contract MOST 106-3011-E-168-001 and
tennas were designed and simulated on High Frequency Struc- MOST 106-2221-E-168-020.
ture Simulator (HFSS), ANSYS [6]. The performance of the
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