Investigations of Substrate and Patch Materials for Sub-Terahertz Wireless Applications Scenario

The appropriate choice of patch and substrate materials has great significance in the performance of the terahertz (THz) microstrip patch antenna. The resonant frequency is dependent on various factors such as dimensions of the patch, substrate thickness, and permittivity. In this work, initially, a microstrip antenna with a silicon substrate was analyzed for different patch materials such as copper, graphene, and gold with a central operating frequency of 300 GHz. The result reveals that the graphene patch has a maximum bandwidth of 1.49 GHz and ideal radiation efficiency. Then, adopting graphene as a patch material, the performance of the antenna is analyzed on the basis of return loss, voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), radiation efficiency, bandwidth, and gain with different substrate materials such as quartz, silicon, silicon dioxide, and silicon nitrate. The results show that quartz has an optimal performance by generating higher bandwidth and radiation efficiency when compared to other chosen substrate materials.