Optimal Planar Electric Dipole Antennas: Searching for antennas reaching the fundamental bounds on selected metrics

Considerable time is often spent optimizing antennas to meet specific design metrics. Rarely, however, are the resulting antenna designs compared to rigorous physical bounds on those metrics. Here, we study the performance of optimized planar meander line antennas with respect to such bounds. Results show that these simple structures meet the lower bound on the radiation quality factor (Q-factor) (maximizing single-resonance fractional bandwidth) but are far from reaching the associated physical bounds for efficiency. The relative performance of other canonical antenna designs is comparable in similar ways, and the quantitative results are connected to intuitions from small antenna design, physical bounds, and matching network design.