Abstract— This paper presents a compact multiband planar antenna
designed for mobile phone applications. The antenna performance is
achieved by designing a planar monopole antenna into distributed
radiating elements. The proposed antenna is comprised of a chopped
circular radiator appended with a meander line and an L-strip coupled
element which is an extension of the ground plane. The combination
of a chopped circular patch and L-shaped coupling strip residing on
the top side generates lower band while upper band resonances are
attained separately by chopped circular resonator and meander line
elements. The antenna shows a planar structure which occupies an
area of 17.6 × 56 mm and can be directly printed onto a circuit board
at low cost making it especially suitable for mobile phone
applications. The manufactured antenna is experimentally verified
and covers several wireless communication bands, namely, LTE 750,
GSM 850, GSM 900, DCS, UMTS-2110, Bluetooth, WLAN,
WiMAX and UWB. The high frequency structure simulation (HFSS)
is employed to design and analyze the antenna performance, and a
practical structure was fabricated and tested. The measured and
simulated return loss show good agreement.
Index Terms—multiband planar antenna, meander line,
communication bands, mobile phone.
I. INTRODUCTION
he remarkable progress in mobile communication systems
has proportionally led to the advancement of antenna
systems in the recent decade. The typical mobile
communication system has rapidly evolved, emerging from
analog systems to systems fully capable of multimedia
transmission. On the other hand the rapid evolution has also
come forward as an advancement in hand held mobile devices.
Besides keeping the appearances of these devices attractive,
devices must also be small in dimension i.e., not only in the
plane parallel to the screen but also in the thickness to be
competitive in the market. Attractiveness in appearance had
greatly influenced prevailing internal antenna over external
antenna, which are completely concealed in a mobile phone
[1], [2]. There has been a huge trend of equipping the mobile
devices with more components adding more functionality
while reducing the size and thickness. Thus size of mobile
devices has been consistently decreasing, making it slimmer
and smaller with respect to space for an antenna, which is
making a bit more challenging for antenna designers to meet
such limitations.
Current trend in multi-band antenna designs used in mobile
devices can be categorized into three types: slot-type antennas,
monopole antennas and planar inverted-F antennas (PIFA) [3],
[4]. Slot antenna can also be operated as a quarter-wavelength
resonant structure, when a slot is cut at the edge of ground
plane [5]-[7]. Multiple resonant modes are achieved through
different slots of various geometric cuts onto the radiator and
ground plane [8]-[10]. In [11]-[13], antenna size is decreased
and its bandwidth is increased through employing capacitive
and inductive loading/de-loading techniques. Also
implementation of parallel combination of slot and PIFA on
handset antenna designs can be seen in [14], [15]. The third
group, monopole antennas are also operated as a quarter-
wavelength resonant structures [16], [17]. The planar
monopole has a capability to provide a wide impedance
bandwidth. There are several techniques which facilitate
multiband operation. In [18], by adding some branches and
introducing fractal patterns to the monopole design, multiple
resonant bands are achieved. Another interesting work is
implemented by a two branch monopole on a dielectric
loading to minimize the antenna size as shown in [19].
In this article, a planar multiband antenna is proposed for
mobile communication & ultra wideband applications. The
antenna performance is achieved by a planar monopole
antenna with multi-resonating elements. The multiband
antenna covers all popular cellular and internet
communication bands: LTE 750, GSM 850 (824-960 MHz),
GSM 900 (880-960 MHz), DCS (1710-1880 MHz), UMTS-
2110 (2110-2200 MHz), 2.4 GHz WLAN (2400-2480 MHz),
ISM/Bluetooth (2400-2480 MHz), WiMAX (2500-2690 MHz
& 3400-3600 MHz) and Ultra Wideband (3.1-10.6 GHz). This
design is fully planar, fairly compact, and utilizes low cost
Roger 4360 substrate material.
II. ANTENNA CONFIGURATION
Figure 1 shows the geometry of the proposed planar monopole
antenna, which is fabricated using a 0.305 mm thick, 48 mm
wide, and 119.6 mm high Rogers 4360 substrate having a
dielectric constant of 6.15. On the rear side of dielectric
substrate, a 47 × 102 mm ground plane resides. As depicted in
Figure 1(a), the antenna element is designed on the top frontal
portion of dielectric substrate covering an area of 43.1 × 13.5
mm which is conventionally referred to as the antenna area.
The proposed antenna can be classified into three major
resonant structures according to its inherent functionality: a
main radiator (a chopped circular radiator), a meander line
element, and a parasitic element (L-strip resonator). All these
elements are printed coplanar with the ground plane.
The geometry of the main radiator is illustrated in Figure 1(b).
It is composed of a semicircular shape with a radius of 29 mm.
Its left and right portion is chopped and a meander line is
introduced on the right side. The extended meander element is
A Multi-Wideband Planar Monopole Antenna
for 4G Devices
A. Asghar, M. Malick, M. Karlsson, Member, IEEE, and A. Hussain