mmWave Antenna Design for 5G Telecommunications

The high data rates required for the 5G standards leads to the need for greater band­widths. The available bandwidth in the microwave spectrum is not sufficient to satisfy these requirements. This has moved the required operating frequency bands up into the millimeter wave range for the 5G communication systems.

The antenna design for the mmWave massive MIMO has the following important aspects: the beamforming and synthesizing the array, designing the antenna elements; designing the feeding network, the effect of the coupling between the adjacent antenna elements, and the effect of surrounded materials on the radiation characteristics of the antennas.

The beamform is designed in order to maximize each user’s received signal power while minimizing the interference signal power from the other users.

The beamforming techniques are classified into analogue beamforming, digital beamforming, and hybrid beamforming. The benefit of employing analogue beamforming is that inexpensive phase shifters are used, while digital beamforming has the advantage of providing more accurate

and rapid foundation results to obtain user signals. However, digital beamforming suffers from high complexity and an expensive design. Hybrid analogue/digital beamforming (Figure 1) has been introduced for massive MIMO systems to obtain the advantages of analogue and digital beamforming.

Figure 1: Block diagram for Hybrid Beamforming

The antenna design for mmWave massive MIMO include design antennas for smart phones, indoor small-cell networks, and the base stations.

The antenna design for the above problems focuses on design of ultrawideband (UWB), wide scanning, and dual-polarized phased arrays that shall scan the beam electronically. The reflection coefficient should be simulated when the antenna excited by the practical feeding structure over a wide range of frequencies, e.g. 10-80 GHz. The radiation pattern and the directivity level should be simulated and the stability of the radiation pattern should be tested over the operating frequency band and the symmetry in co-polar and cross-polar components should be inspected.

HASystem Tech can develop or choose which method/software is the best for your design.

Simulation of massive array of tightly coupled antennas with the feeding network over an UWB, e.g. 20 – 50 GHz is challenging. HASystem Tech solve such kind of problems using techniques that we had developed such as domain decomposition.  

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