Evaluation, Optimization and Characterization of Miniaturized Triple Band Antennas for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E

Abstract: Antenna is a key component in wireless devices such as cell phones, laptops and smartwatches. With the new generation of Wi-Fi technology: Wi-Fi 6E coming out, 1200MHz bandwidth from 5.925GHz to 7.125GHz is freed for use. Mobile devices are expected to meet the required bandwidth allocated for Wi-Fi 6E. However, electrically small antenna design for Wi-Fi 6 and 6E applications has been a challenge. Reducing the size of antennas while maintaining the performance is one major issue. The goal of this project is to evaluate different antennas and try to find the potential compact antenna that could cover Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E bands. In this project, we evaluated different types of electrically small antennas, explored parameters that affect antenna performance, characterized one nominated antenna in High Frequency Simulation Software(HFSS), prototyped the antenna in Altium Designer and measured the antenna performance using Network Analyzer. The measurement result shows that the proposed antenna is omni-directional, partially meet the fixed frequency requirement and has low efficiency at 2.4GHz but good efficiency at 6GHz bands. The conclusion is that the proposed antenna is good for the extended bandwidth of Wi-Fi 6 but for the whole Wi-Fi 6E the performance still needs to be improved in future work.