Pulse Electronics Improves Antenna Evaluation And Reduces Product Design Lead Time With CST MICROWAVE STUDIO

The antenna is one of the first electromechanical components considered in a new product concept design. In the past, most of the R&D work was done in the laboratory, with the engineers constructing and testing different antenna designs for customers’ products. While this is still a good approach for single antenna systems, the introduction of LTE diversity schemes and other radio systems such as Wi-Fi and GPS to current smartphones make reliable prototype evaluation very challenging.

Antenna prototypes typically include the device ground, PCBs, batteries, covers and any other large parts. Obviously, early prototypes seldom include any active transceivers, and so each antenna must be driven from an external coaxial cable. A typical LTE smartphone, with its main and diversity antennas, GPS and GLONASS systems and 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WLAN capabilities, can need 7 or 8 cables to measure all the components at once. These cables would occupy too much of the volume of the prototypes, and severely distort the evaluation results. With electromagnetic simulation, the performance of a complex device can be calculated without worrying about these cable effects.

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