Active Integrated Wearable Textile Antenna With Optimized Noise Characteristics

The design of the first wearable active receiving textile antenna in the 2.45 GHz ISM band is addressed for use in personal area networks. The integrated low-noise amplifier is realized on a hybrid textile substrate and positioned directly underneath a wearable patch antenna. The antenna and low-noise amplifier are designed by means of circuit/full-wave co-optimization techniques within a novel multi-platform simulation setup to account for all the losses induced by using textile materials. A good agreement between simulations and measurements is obtained. An available gain of about 12 dB, on top of the passive antenna gain of about 5 dBi, and a noise figure of about 1.3 dB are realized. The effect of the human body on the active antenna performance is investigated by means of on-body measurements.