Electrically Small Antennas – Reliable Design and Verification

Electrically small antennas are a crucial part of portable battery-supplied devices. However, they pose considerable design challenges as they are inherently narrowband structures which are sensitive to objects in their vicinity such as housing, batteries, cables or PCBs.

This eSeminar will present the design workflow for electrically small antennas, with a focus on the reliability of the design procedure. Typical design workflows using measurement by semi-rigid cables often lead to an unreliable design which means that the antenna needs to be experimentally tuned. The same applies to naive model simulation when simulation has been attempted with insufficient input detail.

To tackle these problems, this eSeminar will investigate the sources of the discrepancy in the typical design procedure: environmental effects on the measurement and the use of both vendor datasheet material properties and SMD component models for the matching circuit. Finally, we will present the modified design workflow which uses both simulation in CST Studio Suite® and measurements.

Jan Eichler is a SIMULIA Solution Consultant Specialist and received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in radioelectronics from the Czech Technical University in Prague in 2010 and 2014 respectively. His research was focused on antenna modal decomposition and integral equations in electromagnetics. Eichler’s main area of work involves high frequency applications and EMC/EMI simulation. Eichler also works on development of techniques to characterize material properties from measured data.