We use a gradient-based material distribution approach to design conductive parts of microstrip antennas in an efficient way. The approach is based on solutions of the 3D Maxwell's equation computed by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Given a set of incoming waves, our objective is to maximize the received energy by determining the conductivity on each Yee-edge in the design domain. The objective function gradient is computed by the adjoint-field method. A microstrip antenna is

more »

... esigned to operate at 1.5 GHz with 0.3 GHz bandwidth. We present two design cases. In the first case, the radiating patch and the finite ground plane are designed in two separate phases, whereas in the second case, the radiating patch and the ground plane are simultaneously designed. We use more than 58,000 design variables and the algorithm converges in less than 150 iterations. The optimized designs have impedance bandwidths of 13% and 36% for the first and second design case, respectively.