Virtual antennas simplify IoT embedded antenna design
functional multiband wireless connectivity, enabling a single antenna booster component to function effectively across multiple mobile and wireless designs, thus reducing time to market, product development investments, and of course, cost. In addition, as the antenna boosters are physically built as chip antennas, they can be installed using conventional pick-and-place systems, resulting in lower production cost and improved quality and reliability. Making a match The matching network is key to realizing the unique booster performance. While the antenna booster is standard and can be used across a variety of mobile products, the matching network does need customization for every product, but this is a one-time, up- front design effort. By changing the matching network, the booster’s RF response can be customized to cover the multiple frequency bands required in a modern IoT device or smartphone. The simpler single-band IoT device needs a matching network with typically three to five
Figure 3: The basic Yagi antenna (top) is a three- element antenna widely used in commercial, residential, and military applications. The three elements (bottom) are a driven (active) dipole element with a passive reflector behind it and a passive director in front of it, all mounted on a single boom. Image sources: EuroCaster/ Denmark (top); RFWireless-World (bottom)
board. The designer tunes it to the desired frequency band(s) by creating and adjusting the matching network’s component arrangement and values. In other words, this arrangement creates a new and beneficial synergy between the antenna booster and the surrounding ground plane. A rough analogy would be the effect of attaching a small audio-piezo driver to a rigid tabletop: the tabletop would resonate and, in effect, significantly boost the resultant audio output level. The Ignion antenna boosters are standard, off-the-shelf, surface- mount components that replace conventional customized planar inverted-F antennas (PIFAs) and printed-circuit antennas. They are much smaller than the operating wavelength, typically below 1/30 or even 1/50 of the wavelength and beyond. They provide fully
model-based antenna design, one which looks at the challenge from a different perspective. Instead of relying on a dedicated antenna to radiate an RF signal, the Internet of Things (IoT) device or smartphone radiates the signal directly from the ground plane. To do this, a conventional embedded antenna is replaced with an Ignion NN03-320 DUO mXTEND antenna booster (Figure 3), a 7.0 millimeter (mm) long × 3.0 mm wide × 2.0 mm high passive component that is roughly one-tenth the size of a traditional antenna (note that Ignion was known as Fractus Antennas until 2021). With its unique and patented Virtual Antenna technology – the commercial name for the “antenna- less” technology based on a new generation of tiny components – this booster is always the same component regardless of the size or form factor of the printed circuit
Figure 4: The Ignion NN03-320 DUO mXTEND is a tiny passive component that uses a product’s circuit board ground plane to radiate the RF signal. Image source: Ignion
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