This communication presents a novel approach to integrating a wideband fat dipole antenna with a solar cell for both wireless communication and energy harvesting. The proposed design uses a uniplanar fat dipole structure incorporating a widened dipole arm and a pair of open stubs. The addition of these features compresses the first-, third-, and fifth-order modes, resulting in improved wideband characteristics and a high form factor. Moreover, integrating a dipole antenna with a solar cell provides dual functionality, enabling wireless communication, and energy harvesting from the same device. The antenna and the solar cell were designed to operate independently using RF decoupler circuits. The proposed solar cell integrated antenna achieved a wide -10-dB impedance bandwidth of 105.8% (ranging from 0.98 to 3.18 GHz), and antenna gain varied from 2.1 to 4.7 dBi within the impedance bandwidth. The whole structure has a compact size of 102 × 52 × 0.571 mm ( 0.333λ 0 × 0.170λ 0 × 0.0019λ 0 at 0.98 GHz), with a form factor of 96.2% and an optical transparency of 100%.
This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIT) under Grant NRF-2022R1F1A1065324 and Grant 2021R1A4A1030775; and in part by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIT) under Grant 2022-0-00704-001 (Development of 3D-NET Core Technology for High-Mobility Vehicular Service).
