TY - JOUR
T1 - Thermal Loss Becomes an Issue for Tunable Narrow-band Antennas in Fourth Generation Handsets
AU - Barrio, Samantha Caporal Del
AU - Morris, Art
AU - Pedersen, Gert Frølund
PY - 2015/7
Y1 - 2015/7
N2 - Antenna tuning is a very promising technique to cope with the expansion of the mobile communication frequency spectrum. Tunable antennas can address a wide range of operating frequencies, while being highly integrated. In particular, high-Q antennas (also named narrow-band antennas) are very compact, thus are good candidates to be embedded on fourth generation handsets. This study focuses on ‘high-Q’ tunable antennas and contributes with a characterisation of their loss mechanism, which is a major parameter in link-budget calculations. This study shows, through an example, that the tuner loss is not sufficient to explain the total loss of tunable antennas. It is found that thermal loss –because of the metal conductivity of the antenna itself – plays a major role in the loss mechanism of narrow-band tunable antennas. The investigated high-Q planar inverted F antenna designs exhibit a significant thermal loss; at 1400 MHz nearly 2 dB are lost solely because of the copper conductivity. Thermal loss poses a limitation to achievable performance of tunable antennas and to antenna miniaturisation.
AB - Antenna tuning is a very promising technique to cope with the expansion of the mobile communication frequency spectrum. Tunable antennas can address a wide range of operating frequencies, while being highly integrated. In particular, high-Q antennas (also named narrow-band antennas) are very compact, thus are good candidates to be embedded on fourth generation handsets. This study focuses on ‘high-Q’ tunable antennas and contributes with a characterisation of their loss mechanism, which is a major parameter in link-budget calculations. This study shows, through an example, that the tuner loss is not sufficient to explain the total loss of tunable antennas. It is found that thermal loss –because of the metal conductivity of the antenna itself – plays a major role in the loss mechanism of narrow-band tunable antennas. The investigated high-Q planar inverted F antenna designs exhibit a significant thermal loss; at 1400 MHz nearly 2 dB are lost solely because of the copper conductivity. Thermal loss poses a limitation to achievable performance of tunable antennas and to antenna miniaturisation.
U2 - 10.1049/iet-map.2014.0855
DO - 10.1049/iet-map.2014.0855
M3 - Journal article
SN - 1751-8725
VL - 9
SP - 1015
EP - 1020
JO - IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation
JF - IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation
IS - 10
ER -