Redefining Antenna Design Education: ChatGPT as a copilot for engineering students [Education Corner

This article presents a new approach for antenna design education, associating theoretical and practical aspects with an industrial perspective. The approach is implemented as a one-week course offered by the European School of Antennas (ESoA) every second year and given by a number of skilled instructors from different disciplines under the framework of the ESoA postgraduate school.

Around the world, wireless radio communication technologies are enabling progress across many of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), with communications engineers designing lower cost, more efficient, and reliable technologies. These transforming communication services are enhancing multiple dimensions of societal well-being, including access to education, medical support, food, and gender equity, promoting decent work alongside economic growth. However, engineers are also obliged to minimize all types of pollution in their practice, toward restoring planetary health and sustainable cities and communities. There is increasing awareness and concern about the environmental hazards and use of limited Earth resources in producing electronic goods and services.

A method for measuring deembedded antenna parameters of wearable and implanted antennas for on-body communications is presented. It consists of a tapered flat phantom in order to characterize an antenna’s general ability to excite surface waves traveling along the boundary between body tissue and free space, expressed by an angular on-body antenna gain. The design offers a test zone large enough for most typical wireless body area network devices up to smartphone size while minimizing the required amount of tissue-simulating material. The designed antenna test range is validated in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. To showcase the applicability to a realistic application, different designs of antennas integrated into an implanted pacemaker are characterized by their on-body gain patterns. A comparison of their performance in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> path-loss measurements reveals a clear relation to the on-body gain patterns and indicates that this parameter is a suitable measure for enabling educated antenna design for on-body applications.

In this paper, examples of student projects illustrate the level that antenna design education can be taken through the use of software and hardware tools. Through project based courses, s complete design experience can be provided that includes the development of analytical models in addition to the use of software modeling tools, construction and validation by measurements.