Abstract
In this paper, a low‐profile aperture‐stacked patch (LP‐ASP) antenna for breast cancer detection applications is proposed. The antenna is embodied by three substrate layers, in which one layer is applied to feed all stacks and the other two are adjoined substrates with rectangular patches, mounted on the top of the feeding layer. The feeding layer consists of a fork‐shaped strip on one side, and an H‐shaped slot attached to a cross‐shaped slot on the other side. By using the proposed feeding structure and a designed defected ground plane, an additional current path is provided which generates extra resonances and widens the impedance bandwidth from 2.5 to 15 GHz. The overall size of the antenna is 10 × 10 × 3.475 mm3, which is approximately 0.083λ × 0.083λ × 0.03λ at the antenna's lowest operating frequency. To evaluate the performance of the designed antenna in an imaging system, first, a breast model with an embedded spherical tumor (with a radius of 4 mm) is constructed. Then, a conformal array of the designed antenna with 17 elements on a cross‐arranged lattice is placed around the breast model. The quantitative metrics of the reconstructed images show that the proposed antenna can be a good candidate for the breast cancer detection applications.