Antenna design for mobile terminals

Research from Dr Tim Brown has a foundational element concerning the design of small antennas for mobile terminals including handsets, laptop computers, tablet devices as well as small access points that have a low profile so as to not have aesthetic impact where they are deployed. For a number of years now it has become increasingly necessary to implement more than one antenna on a mobile terminal. This begun in the late 1990s where Japanese mobile handsets were requiring a diversity antenna on the mobile terminal as well as at the base station. More recently for the latest wireless local area networks standard, IEEE 802.11n, it includes multiple input multiple output (MIMO) requiring more than one antenna at the access point and mobile terminal.

Example two element diversity antenna on a mobile terminal

For future mobile networks including 3GPP LTE and WiMax the use of MIMO will be a requirement, while also multiple bands will be required to support many standards including RFID, mobile broadcasting, Bluetooth and WLAN depending on the complexity of the mobile terminal.

Enquiries are invited for industrial research on mobile terminal antenna designs, with custom support to a particular application. There is also in house availability of an anechoic chamber and wideband channel sounder for diversity evaluation purposes.

Previous publications from Dr Brown on the topic have included the design considerations of mobile terminal diversity antennas while also other research on the capability of using polarisation at the mobile terminal is investigated in the following publications:

T W C Brown, S R Saunders, B G Evans, "Analysis of Mobile Terminal Diversity Antennas", IEE Proceedings, Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation, vol. 152, February 2005, pp1-6.

T W C Brown, S R Saunders, S Stavrou and M Fiacco, "Characterisation of Polarization Diversity at the Mobile", IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 56, issue 5, part 1, pp2440-2447, September 2007.

T W C Brown, "Indoor MIMO Measurements using Polarization at the Mobile", IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, vol. 7, pp400-403, 2008.

Click here for contact details.

Tim Brown
February 2012