IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

5, 2006

343

A Compact Multiband Planar Antenna for Mobile Handsets

Xu Jing, Zhengwei Du, and Ke Gong, Member, IEEE
AbstractA novel compact planar antenna is presented in this letter, which can operate in ve bands: GSM (890960 MHz), DCS (17101880 MHz), PCS (18501990 MHz), UMTS (19202170 MHz), and WLAN (24002484 MHz). Consisting of three resonant branches and one tuning branch, the antenna occupies an area of 15 mm2 . Due to its two-dimensional (2-D) structure, the 38.5 antenna is directly printed on the circuit board with low cost, and can be easily integrated with other parts of the circuits of mobile handsets. A prototype has been fabricated and tested, and the experimental results validate the design procedure. Index TermsAntennas, mobile antennas, multifrequency antennas.

I. INTRODUCTION

HE development of wireless communication systems and services has caused great demands in designing multiband and wideband antennas for mobile handsets. As popular personal information tools, mobile phones are not only required to work in all bands of 2-G mobile communication systems such as GSM (890960 MHz), DCS (17101880 MHz), and PCS (18501990 MHz), but also going to accommodate 3-G bands as UMTS (19202170 MHz). Moreover, there is strong trend to integrate WLAN (24002484 MHz) service into mobile phones for Internet access. To achieve multiband operation in handsets, a variety of antenna congurations have been proposed. The planar inverted-F antennas (PIFAs) have shown good performances, whereas their three-dimensional (3-D) congurations increase the manufacture difculty and cost [1], [2]. The planar monopole antennas are easy to fabricate, but sometimes have to be folded into 3-D structures to shrink their sizes for tting in common handsets [3], [4]. A real planar antenna has been recovers GSM, ported in [5], whose bandwidth for VSWR DCS, PCS, and UMTS bands. In this letter, a planar monopole antenna with a compact two-dimensional (2-D) structure is presented. It is found that with a novel tuning branch protruding from the resonant branch, the antenna can not only work in the four bands of GSM, DCS, PCS, and UMTS, but also in the commonly used WLAN band of 802.11b/g. II. ANTENNA CONFIGURATION

Fig. 1. Conguration of the proposed planar monopole antenna on a 0.8-mm FR-4 substrate. (a) Top view. (b) Detailed dimensions of radiating element. All dimensions in millimeters.

The geometry of the proposed planar monopole antenna is shown in Fig. 1. The whole antenna, printed on a 0.8-mm FR-4
Manuscript received March 24, 2006; revised June 2, 2006. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60271007 and the Tsinghua-QUALCOMM Associated Research Plan. The authors are with the State Key Laboratory on Microwave and Digital Communications, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: jingxu99@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2006.880690

substrate , occupies an area of 38.5 15 mm . As depicted in Fig. 1(a), the 50 microstrip feeding line is laid on an ordinary PCB, which can be treated as the circuits part , the width of which of a handset. The tapered element changes linearly from 1.54 to 4 mm, improves the impedance matching at the feeding point and is also radiating as part of a monopole. There are three monopoles starting from point , considered as three radiating elements or branches. The rst and the second one , branch 78 and 95 mm long, respectively, generate the GSM resonating is about band together. The length of the third branch 38 mm, approximately one-quarter wavelength of 2-GHz freis for tuning and affects quency. The additional branch

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 5, 2006

Fig. 2. Measured and simulated return losses of the proposed antenna.

the higher modes of the rst and the second branches, resulting into the operation band of WLAN in 2.4 GHz. It is to note that the three radiating elements are not independent but coupling with each other, so that they have to be optimized jointly to meet the multiband operation requirements. The detailed dimensions of the antenna are given in Fig. 1(b). III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION A prototype based on the design was fabricated and measured with HP-8510C Vector Network Analyzer. The measured and simulated return losses of the antenna are shown in Fig. 2, from which good agreement can be observed. The simulation was carried out with the commercially available software Ansoft High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). It is seen that the rst , which is formed band is from 891 to 961 MHz for VSWR by two resonating modes close to each other and satises the GSM operation. The second band is from 1705 to 2180 MHz, covering the DCS, PCS, and UMTS bands. The third band is from 2341 to 2980 MHz, sufcient for WLAN operation. In the third band two resonance frequencies can be observed clearly, one at 2.4 and the other at 2.7 GHz. With the simulation software the surface current on the antenna was studied, and the distribution of the current shows that the resonance frequency at 2.4 GHz owes to the higher modes of the rst and the second branches, as mentioned in Section II, while the higher mode of accounts for the resthe additional branch onance at 2.7 GHz. The ripples seen at low frequency are generated by the radiation of the feeding cable. The inuence of the nite-size ground is studied through software simulation. It is shown that the length and width of the rectangular ground plane hardly affect the GSM band at 900 MHz, but can greatly change both the resonance frequency and the impedance matching of the second band around 2 GHz. Hence, the parameters of the antenna may need to be adjusted and reoptimized in case of any necessary change in the size of the ground plane. Additionally, the performance of any radiating branch may be affected by other branches because of the coupling effect. For

Fig. 3. Measured radiation patterns of the proposed antenna. (a) 935 MHz. (b) 1950 MHz. (c) 2400 MHz.

example, it is found that in general, the resonance frequency of increases with the length of the addithe third branch reduced. However, when the length is less tional branch than 7 mm (10.2 mm in Fig. 1), namely the distance between the two branches is sufcient for their independence, the resonance will stay unchanged. frequency of the third branch Therefore, to keep the size of the antenna compact, the coupling effects have to be taken into account and the parameters need to be optimized jointly to satisfy the operation requirements. The radiation characteristics of the proposed antenna are also investigated, and the measured radiation patterns in the x-y and y-z planes at 935, 1950, and 2400 MHz are depicted in Fig. 3. The measured antenna gains at the three frequencies listed above are 1.09, 1.64, and 3.19 dBi, respectively. IV. CONCLUSION A novel multiband planar antenna consisting of three resonating branches and one tuning branch is introduced, which, as shown by measurements, can operate in ve-band of GSM,

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DCS, PCS, UMTS, as well as WLAN 802.11b/g. Additionally, its two-dimensional structure leads to the advantages of easy-fabrication, low-cost, and better integration possibility. The compact size and radiation patterns make the antenna suitable for mobile handset applications. REFERENCES
[1] Y. X. Guo, I. Ang, and M. Y. W. Chia, Compact internal multiband antennas for mobile handsets, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 2, pp. 143146, 2003.

[2] P. Ciais, R. Staraj, G. Kossiavas, and C. Luxey, Compact internal multiband antenna for mobile phone and WLAN standards, Electron. Lett., vol. 40, no. 15, pp. 920921, 2004. [3] C. Y. Chiu, P. L. Teng, and K. L. Wong, Shorted, folded planar monopole antenna for dual-band mobile phone, Electron. Lett., vol. 39, no. 18, pp. 13011302, 2003. [4] P. L. Teng, H. T. Chen, and K. L. Wong, Multi-frequency planar monopole antenna for GSM/DCS/PCS/WLAN operation, Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 36, no. 5, pp. 350352, 2003. [5] K. L. Wong, G. Y. Lee, and T. W. Chiou, A low-prole planar monopole antenna for multiband operation of mobile handsets, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 121125, Jan. 2003.