Inkjet-Printed Pixel Antennas with Hexagonal Cells

We present a new type of pixel antennas involving hexagonal unit cells that are suitable for fabrication in low-cost inkjet-printing setups. Antennas are optimized in a rigorous simulation environment based on the multilevel fast multipole algorithm integrated into genetic algorithms. Hexagonal cells are suitable for both the optimization environment and fabrication setup. Optimizations are performed particularly to design radio-frequency-identification tags, by removing pixels from a given template to achieve the best performance, e.g., minimum reflection coefficient values and maximum reading ranges. The overall design, optimization, and fabrication procedure has a fast demand response, requiring only one day from a request to the prototype stage.