Antenna Booster replaces multiple customised mobile antennas

The fast pace, ever changing evolution of the wireless industry puts an enormous time-to-market pressure on the engineering of every new mobile device. Being in the heart of every mobile product, the design of the RF front-end and in particular, the antenna, becomes specially cumbersome as every product currently requires a fully customised antenna. Fractus' Virtual Antenna technology has been conceived to address this particular issue, proposing a new standard antenna element, the miniature mXTEND Antenna Booster, to virtually replace every customised antenna in virtually every mobile product.

Handset antennas have significantly evolved from the original external antennas covering one or two bands to internal antennas featuring multiple bands enabling smartphones to operate in 2G, 3G, and 4G standards in multiple regions of the world. The market pressure is currently focused on demanding handset devices capable of supporting sophisticated services requiring considerable high quality, high data rates, such as video on demand, video streaming, video conference, voice over IP, etc. The integration of all these services and functionalities inside current handset platforms featured by strict constraints in terms of size, weight, profile, and energy consumption increases the challenges for antenna engineers.

Following the state-of-the-art approach in handset antenna design, the complexity of the antenna solution increases together with an increase in the number of operating frequency bands. Generally, the larger the number of operating bands the greater the dimensions of the antenna and its geometrical complexity. The current technological trend has been precisely to take advantage of geometrical complexity to optimise the size and performance of every antenna in every single mobile device. In general terms, the greater the number of bands, the greater antenna complexity to pack all radio wavelengths in the available space inside the mobile platform.