AVX Corporation has released off-the-shelf embedded, universal broadband, LTE/LPWA antennas designed for maximum versatility. The 1004795 and 1004796 are compatible with all major worldwide wireless carriers and a variety of common communications protocols. The new antennas meet the steadily increasing cross-market demand for smaller and thinner antennas with high-reliability, ultra-wideband performance capabilities and help OEMs reduce both costs and time-to-market by eliminating engineering fees and extended cycles times associated with custom solutions.
The new universal broadband antennas have a small, low-profile, FR4 form factor that employs patented Isolated Magnetic Dipole (IMD) technology to achieve reduced ground plane size requirements and a small keep-out area for greater design flexibility, independent tuning capabilities for application-specific performance optimization, and high performance and isolation characteristics for better connectivity and minimal interference. The antennas also exhibit high-efficiency, high gain, and high isolation characteristics from 600 - 2700 MHz and, although they are ideally suited for use in applications that leverage CAT-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) communication protocols — including wearables, smart meters, medical, industrial, and IoT devices, machine-to-machine and FirstNet communications systems, point-of-sale terminals, tracking systems, and automotive electronics — they also support Sigfox, LoRa, Cellular LPWA, RPMA, and Broadband LTE (OCTA-BAND) protocols.
These extremely versatile, high-performance antennas measure just 36.0 mm (±0.3 mm) long, 9.0 mm (±0.2 mm) wide, and 3.2 mm (±0.3 mm) high, weigh 2.1g, and support low-band frequencies extending from 600–1,000 MHz, high-band frequencies extending from 1700–2200 MHz, and ultra-high-band frequencies extending from 2500–2700 MHz. They are also RoHS compliant and available in a mirrored version (1004796) for even greater design flexibility and with optional evaluation boards for easy, efficient testing. Typical performance characteristics for the standard (1004795) antenna on a 125 mm x 45 mm PCB include linear polarization, 2W continuous waveform (CW) power consumption, 50Ω unbalanced feed-point impedance, peak gain ranging from 2.4 dBi (1710–2220 MHz) to 0.9 dBi (2500–2700 MHz), average efficiency extending from 48% (2500–2700 MHz) to 61% (600–698 MHz), and VSWR match spanning <5.5:1 (600–698 MHz) to <2.5:1 (1710–2200 MHz).
These off-the-shelf solutions provide high-reliability performance from 600–2700 MHz in an extensive range of wireless applications within medical, industrial, telecommunications, networking, and automotive electronics. Their miniaturized FR4 form factor satisfies growing cross-market demands for size and weight savings and leverages AVX’s patented IMD technology to offer independent tuning capabilities for broad application-specific performance optimization. In addition, although they are ideally suited for CAT-M and NB-IoT applications, both the standard and mirrored variants are compatible with several other communication protocols and with all major worldwide wireless carriers, providing OEMs with significant savings in terms of both cost and time-to-market as well.
The new SMT antennas are shipped in tape and reel packaging compatible with automated pick-and-place processing and currently have a nine-week lead-time.
