A novel design of a quarter-wave shorted trapezoidal metal plate solar antenna using high efficiency polycrystalline silicon solar cells is presented. Using the DC conductive parts of the cell as RF antenna elements as well as choosing the radiating element to be a small base trapezoid, better coupling between the feed and shorting plates is ensured and 40.3% size reduction compared to a conventional shorted quarter-wave patch is obtained. The trapezoidal radiating element covers merely 2.7% of

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... the total available illumination area of the solar cell, leaving its efficiency essentially unaffected. The proposed design strategy has been verified by an instantiation operating at 1.957 GHz and has a wide impedance bandwidth of 15.2% with a gain of 4.5dBi. Introduction: The integration of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells and the antenna into a single unit can address the critical needs of reduced mass, physical size and cost of enabling technologies that will offer futuristic applications in autonomous wireless communication systems and deep space missions. Locating photovoltaic cells behind the microstrip reflect array antenna and integration of amorphous silicon solar cells with a slot antenna offers promising solutions [1, 2] . But most of these solar antenna designs suffer from low solar cell efficiency owing to increased RF radiating surface area, which reduces the total available illumination area for the photovoltaic cell. Moreover, these designs undergo poor return loss, bandwidth and gain performance inherent with microstrip patch designs [3] . The key to providing a flexible solution is to have the RF radiating element small compared to the integrated solar cell and the simultaneous use of the DC conductive parts of the cell as RF antenna elements. In this Letter we propose the novel design of a solar antenna with high efficiency polycrystalline silicon solar cells where the RF radiating element size is greatly reduced using a trapezoidal shorted quarter-wave metal plate. The DC conductive silver bus bars of the PV cell form the RF reflecting ground plane in order to accomplish total integration of the two technologies.