1510 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES,VOL. 50, NO. 6, JUNE 2002
Full-Wave Analysis of a Wide Class of Microstrip
Resonators Fabricated on Magnetized Ferrites
With Arbitrarily Oriented Bias Magnetic Field
Germán León, Rafael R. Boix, Member, IEEE, and Francisco Medina, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—A numerical code has been developed for the
full-wave determination of the resonant frequencies and quality
factors of microstrip patches with right-angle corners of arbitrary
shape in the case in which the substrate of the patches is a mag-
netized ferrite with arbitrarily oriented bias magnetic field. The
code is based on the solution of an electric-field integral equation
by means of Galerkin’s method in the spectral domain. The
evaluation of the infinite integrals arising from the application
of the numerical method is efficiently carried out by means of
a technique based on the interpolation of the spectral dyadic
Green’s function. The numerical results obtained indicate that
microstrip patches fabricated on ferrite substrates present cutoff
frequency regions in which resonances cannot occur owing to
the excitation of magnetostatic modes. The limits of these cutoff
regions are shown to be dependent on the orientation and the
magnitude of the bias magnetic field, on the shape of the patches,
and even on the nature of every particular resonant mode. The
numerical results also show that the resonant frequencies of
microstrip patches on magnetized ferrites can always be tuned
over a wide frequency range provided the orientation of the bias
magnetic field is suitably chosen.
Index Terms—Magnetic tuning, magnetostatic modes, micro-
strip resonators, microwave ferrites, spectral-domain approach.
I. INTRODUCTION
R
ESONANT microstrip patches can be used either as an-
tennas or as components of oscillators and filters in mi-
crowave integrated circuits. Although the most conventional mi-
crostrip patches are the rectangular and circular patches, other
geometries such as the rectangular ring [1], the H-shaped patch
[1], and the meander-shaped patch [2] have proven to be useful
because of their size reduction capabilities (e.g., in the design of
antenna arrays, antennas for personal communication systems,
). This means that the algorithms developed for the analysis
of resonant microstrip patches should cover a spectrum of ge-
ometries as wide as possible. Apart from their shape, the na-
ture of the substrate of microstrip patches is another interesting
degree of freedom for the designer of circuits and antennas.
Although the most commonly used substrate materials are di-
electrics, magnetized ferrites have proven to have potential ap-
plication as substrates of microstrip patches. For instance, sev-
Manuscript received January 23, 2001. This work was supported by the
Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología, Spain, under Project
TIC98-0630.
The authors are with the Microwave Group, Department of Electronics and
Electromagnetism, School of Physics, University of Seville, 41012 Seville,
Spain (e-mail: boix@cica.es).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9480(02)05206-7.
eral researchers have reported that resonant microstrip patches
printed on ferrite substrates can be used in the fabrication of
tunable band rejection filters [3] and tunable bandpass filters
[4], [5]. Also, measurements have shown that the operating res-
onant frequency of microstrip antennas printed on ferrite sub-
strates can be varied over a wide frequency range by adjusting
the bias magnetic field [6]. Apart from that, ferrite substrates
can be used for reducing the radar cross section of microstrip
antennas under certain conditions [7]–[9] and for achieving lin-
early, as well as circularly polarized microstrip antennas with a
single feed [10]–[12]. Finally, it should be pointed out that when
ferrite materials are used as substrates of microstrip phased ar-
rays, wide-angle impedance matching can be obtained by dy-
namically adjusting the bias magnetic field with scan angle [11],
[13].
In this paper, the authors present an algorithm for the deter-
mination of the resonant frequencies and quality factors of mi-
crostrip patches with right-angle corners of arbitrary shape in
the case in which the patches are fabricated on magnetized fer-
rites with arbitrarily oriented bias magnetic field. This algorithm
is based on an efficient application of the spectral-domain ap-
proach (SDA) [14], [15]. The study carried out in this paper is
an ambitious generalization of that published in previous pa-
pers [3], [16], [17] where the SDA was applied to the full-wave
analysis of microstrip resonators of both circular shape [3], [17]
and rectangular shape [16] fabricated on normally biased ferrite
substrates. There is also an additional related paper in which
rectangular microstrip resonators on in-plane biased ferrite sub-
strates were analyzed by means of the cavity model [18]. How-
ever, the drawback of the cavity model is that it fails to explain
how the resonances of microstrip patches on ferrite substrates
are affected by the excitation of magnetostatic modes along the
substrate [17]. Fortunately, the SDA is capable of accounting for
the excitation of magnetostatic modes since the information of
these modes is included in the spectral dyadic Green’s function
(in fact, the propagation constants of the magnetostatic modes
are complex poles of the aforementioned spectral Green’s func-
tion [9], [17]).
Concerning the contents of this paper, Section II briefly
describes the application of the SDA to the full-wave analysis
of microstrip resonators fabricated on ferrite substrates. In
this section, a powerful technique is explained, which makes
possible the fast computation of infinite integrals arising from
the application of the SDA. In Section III, numerical results
are presented for the resonant frequencies and quality factors
of microstrip patches of different shapes (rectangular, H-, and
0018-9480/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE