applied sciences Article Bio-Inspired Dielectric Resonator Antenna for Wideband Sub-6 GHz Range Luigi Melchiorre 1 , Ilaria Marasco 1,* , Giovanni Niro 1, Vito Basile 2 , Valeria Marrocco 2 , Antonella D’Orazio 1 and Marco Grande 1,* 1 Politecnico di Bari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e dell’Informazione, Via E. Orabona 4, 70125 Bari, Italy;
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[email protected] (A.D.) 2 STIIMA CNR, Institute of Intelligent Industrial Technologies and Systems for Advanced Manufacturing, National Research Council, Via P. Lembo, 38/F, 70124 Bari, Italy;
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[email protected] (M.G.) Received: 10 November 2020; Accepted: 7 December 2020; Published: 10 December 2020 Abstract: Through the years, inspiration from nature has taken the lead for technological development and improvement. This concept firmly applies to the design of the antennas, whose performances receive a relevant boost due to the implementation of bio-inspired geometries. In particular, this idea holds in the present scenario, where antennas working in the higher frequency range (5G and mm-wave), require wide bandwidth and high gain; nonetheless, ease of fabrication and rapid production still have their importance. To this aim, polymer-based 3D antennas, such as Dielectric Resonator Antennas (DRAs) have been considered as suitable for fulfilling antenna performance and fabrication requirements. Differently from numerous works related to planar-metal-based antenna development, bio-inspired DRAs for 5G and mm-wave applications are at their beginning.