| Summary: | In this paper, we describe some promising solutions to the modern need for wearable, energy-aware, miniaturized, wireless systems, whose typical envisaged application is a body area network (BAN). To reach this goal, novel materials are adopted, such as fabrics, in place of standard substrates and metallizations, which require a systematic procedure for their electromagnetic characterization. Indeed, the design of such sub-systems represents a big issue, since approximate approaches could result in strong deviations from the actual system performance. To face this problem, we demonstrate our design procedure, which is based on the concurrent use of electromagnetic software tools and nonlinear circuit-level techniques, able to simultaneously predict the actual system behavior of an antenna system, consisting of the radiating and of the nonlinear blocks, at the component level. This approach is demonstrated for the design of a fully-wearable tri-band rectifying antenna (rectenna) and of a button-shaped, electrically-small antenna deploying a novel magneto-dielectric substrate. Simulations are supported by measurements, both in terms of antenna port parameters and far-field results.
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