Design of a Proposed Millimeter-Wave Metamaterial Structure to Increase the End-Fire Antenna Gain

In this article, an end-fire microstrip dipole antenna, with high gain and capability of operating in millimeter-wave frequency band (57-64 GHz) is designed. The high gain of the antenna, with concept of negative permeability is achieved by the proposed metamaterial slabs embedded in horizontal plane of the dipole antenna. Each slab is loaded by a novel unit-cell. The result of the full-wave simulation presents the fact that the proposed design, would cause a better gain of 6.2 dBi in comparison with conventional dipole antenna without using metamaterial structures. In this structure, 28 metamaterial slabs from proposed unit-cells are used. These unit-cells are capable of creating two magnetic resonances that can play an important role to improve the gain in a wide frequency band. How to achieve this gain enhancement, depends on the number and decoration of metamaterial slabs around the antenna. These proposed metamaterial slabs are placed on top of the horizontal plane of the antenna, and also on the bottom of the antenna plane. This would cause the main lobe to stay still to the desired direction.