Flexible Antenna: A Review of Design, Materials, Fabrication, and Applications

Abstract

The Flexible antenna is experiencing major growth recently because of the demand for wearable devices, military applications, health monitoring systems, communication devices, and global positioning systems (GPS). The choice of the flexible antenna relies on many factors such as materials used, substrate, antenna performance, processing technique, and the surrounding environment. Numerous antenna designs had been investigated by the researchers using conductive materials such as silver. Substrates such as cotton and elastomeric polymers with different fabrication techniques such as screen printing and inkjet printing had been implemented for various applications. This paper focuses on the previous work of flexible antenna design and miniaturization techniques such as electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) for button antenna. A summary of previous works on the flexible antenna is also highlighted.