Taoglas has announced a revolutionary breakthrough in antenna design that will deliver significantly increased antenna performance. This innovation is particularly suited to designs with shorter ground planes, allowing IoT and other device designers to bring to market a wider range of smaller devices that would otherwise not have been able to meet certain stringent carrier certification requirements. Taoglas is showcasing its patent-pending Taoglas Boost technology at Mobile World Congress Americas 2018.
The device size versus performance dilemma has long been an issue in the IoT industry. It affects aesthetics, power consumption, costs, and use cases. Due to the migration to 4G cellular networks, additional frequency bands are used by network providers to increase service level speeds and throughput. Many IoT devices require that antennas be able to send and receive efficiently at all bands to be globally compliant, without the need to change antennas based on region. Devices may also require 2G/3G fall-back. Traditionally this is achieved by increasing the ground-plane length of the board the antenna is mounted on. As a result, many devices are larger than is required - or practical - for the application they serve.
Taoglas Boost has addressed this challenge by utilizing a new technique to alter the electrical delay in the ground plane to improve efficiency at the lower frequencies (600 to 1000 MHz) typically used for cellular applications. The modification can be implemented in the “keep-out” area of the antenna, the area on the host circuit board reserved for antenna placement, causing minimal impact to the designer in terms of antenna integration.
A tuning feature is integrated into the design to allow for quick optimization as Taoglas Boost is implemented in a customer device. The result is an up to 2 dB of antenna efficiency improvement on the same ground plane length compared to traditional technology. Extra antenna gain improves any system-level gain but this improvement can be particularly useful for meeting over-the-air (OTA) requirements for size-constrained devices commonly found in M2M and IoT applications. This new invention and technology can be implemented with any onboard antenna. For more information about Taoglas Boost and its integration with Taoglas’ antennas, click here.
