Bandwidth Enhancement Technique for Broadside Tri-Modal Patch Antenna

Abstract

A technique for enhancing the bandwidth of a broadside tri-modal patch antenna is described. The key idea of the technique is to incorporate a dual-resonance structure into the broadside tri-modal patch geometry. By increasing one edge of the tri-modal patch while decreasing its size at the opposite edge, the resulting structure can be viewed as two superimposed Y-shaped structures of different resonant frequencies. This intuition is confirmed using characteristic mode analysis (CMA). Furthermore, guided by CMA, further modifications enable two sets of resonant modes to be tuned for increasing the bandwidth of the tri-modal patch antenna. Importantly, the proposed bandwidth enhancement technique does not affect the desired broadside radiation patterns significantly. Therefore, it can be utilized to modify the tri-modal patch antenna without degrading its potential for massive MIMO array application. Measurement results show that the technique enhances the 10 dB impedance bandwidth from 4.3% to 19.7% with the largest antenna dimension of $0.48{\lambda _{c}}$ , where ${\lambda _{c}}$ is the wavelength in air at the center frequency. The design example of the proposed technique is able to cover widely used 3 GHz bands in 5G communication systems and its potential usage in massive MIMO arrays is demonstrated.