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High performance 5G millimeter-wave antenna array for 37–40 GHz mobile

application

Conference Paper · March 2018

DOI: 10.1109/IWAT.2018.8379148

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Mingming Peng Anping Zhao

Shenzhen Sunway Communication Co., Ltd. sunway communication
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 High Performance 5G Millimeter-Wave Antenna
Array for 37-40 GHz Mobile Application

Mingming Peng Anping Zhao

Shenzhen Sunway Communication Co., Ltd Shenzhen Sunway Communication Co., Ltd
Kefeng Road NO.2, High-tech Park, Kefeng Road NO.2, High-tech Park,
Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China
mingming.peng@sz-sunway.com anping.zhao@sz-sunway.com

Abstract—In this paper, a high performance 5G millimeter- wavlength requirement for the low frequency, then it will not
wave phased antenna array for 37-40 GHz mobile application is meet the requirement for the high frequency; and vice versa.
proposed. The proposed antenna array is based on dipole
antenna with two opening holes. It is shown that compared to To overcome the above difficulty, a phased array antenna
previous designs our antenna array design has good antenna system with high performance in terms of antenna gain and
performance in terms of antenna gain and scanning property scanning property for frequency from 37 GHz to 40 GHz is
within the entire frequency range. proposed. In particular, the antenna array is based on dipole
antenna with two opening holes, and the reason of opening
Keywords—5G mm-wave; beam forming; phased array antenna these holes is to increase the length of current path, which, in
turn, will reduce the antenna size. In addition, the antenna
I. INTRODUCTION structure is very convenient to be fabricated on the PCB of
mobile device; and the analysis is done with CST software [8].
The millimeter-wave (mm-wave) phased array antenna
will play an important role in the incoming 5G communication
system, as it can offer higher transmission rate, shorter latency II. SINGLE ELEMENT INVESTIGETION
and so on. To speed up the 5G development, many countries Fig. 1 illustrates the single antenna element, which is
around the world have been starting to define their frequency fabricated on PCB using the Rogers RT5880 substrate with
spectrums for the 5G communication. For example, in July thickness Hs = 0.25 mm, and material parameters εr = 2.2,
2016 the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) tanδ = 0.0009. The optimized parameters of this antenna are
announced three licensed mm-wave bands for the 5G specified in Table I. The antenna has a compact size of LS ×
communication used in the US, and they are 28GHz band WS = 2.5 mm × 4 mm. This antenna is a variant of dipole
(from 27.5 GHz to 28.35 GHz), 37 GHz band (from 37 GHz to antenna, and its arm consists of two different opening circles
38.6GHz) and 39 GHz band (from 38.6 GHz to 40 GHz). and the distance between the centers of the circles is 0.6mm.
Recently, studies on how to design mm-wave phased array for
future mobile devices have been carried out [1-7]. The reason
to use phased array antenna is to realize the point-to-point
communication between base station and mobile device. In
particular, a phased antenna array system based on a leaf-
shaped bow-tie antenna element, an ultra-wide band antenna
array based on a two-layered dipole antenna, and a multi-layer
phased array antenna with an off-center dipole antenna
element were developed in [5], [6] and [7], respectively.
Although the phased array antenna systems that can cover the
spectrum from 25 GHz (low frequency) to 40 GHz (high (a)
frequency) was proposed in [5], it is very hard to select a
moderate distance between adjacent antenna elements to have
good scanning property and high antenna gain for all the
frequencies of interest. This is because that, in order to have
better scanning property and high gain for a mm-wave antenna
array, the distance between adjacent antenna elements should
be around 0.5-wavelength of the operated frequency. The
antenna gain will be smaller if the distance is smaller than 0.5-
wavlength; whereas the scanning property will be worse if the (b) (c)
distance is bigger than 0.5-wavlength. Hence, when the
distance between the antenna elements meets the 0.5- Fig. 1. Configuration of the antenna: (a) perspective, (b) top, and (c) bottom.

This work is supported by Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation

Committee under Key Project 20170237.

978-1-5386-1850-9/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

 TABLE I. DIMENSION VALUES OF THE ANTENNA

Parameters Ls Ws Hs R1 R2 RC1 RC2

Value(mm) 2.5 4 0.25 0.56 0.3 0.27 0.23

Parameters Wg Wf1 Lf1 Wf2 Lf2 Wf3 Lf3

Value(mm) 0.86 0.2 0.25 0.34 0.61 0.62 0.74

The antenna is excited by waveguide port [8] and there is

one impedance transformation line between the port and the
antenna. The simulated S11 of the antenna obtained from the
optimized parameters is illustrated in Fig. 2. The antenna can
cover the 37GHz and 39GHz bands. The resonant frequency
and impedance matching of the antenna are influenced by Fig. 5. Simulated S11 of the antenna varies as a function of Wf2.
many parameters, which are depicted in Fig. 3 to Fig.7. It can
be observed from Fig. 3 that when the value of Ws increases
from 3 mm to 5 mm, the resonance frequency of S11 reduces
from 41.75 GHz to 37.91 GHz.

Fig. 6. Simulated S11 of the antenna varies as a function of Lf3.

Fig. 2. Simulated S11 of the single antenna element.

Fig. 7. Simulated S11 of the antenna varies as a function of Wf3.

Fig. 3. Simulated S11 of the antenna varies as a function of WS.

(a) (b ) (c)
Fig. 8. 3D views of the antenna radiation patterns at (a) 37 GHz, (b) 38.5
GHz, and (c) 40 GHz.

The impact of the hole size RC1 on S11 is shown in Fig. 4. It

Fig. 4. Simulated S11 of the antenna varies as a function of RC1.
can been seen from Fig. 4 that the resonant frequency of the
antenna is decreased and the impedance matching gets worse
while RC1 increases from 0.2 mm to 0.36 mm. The width of
the transforming section Wf2 will also have impact on the
resonant frequency, as shown in Fig. 5, when Wf2 increases the
resonant frequency decreases. Fig. 6 shows how S11 varies as a
function of Lf3. One can see from Fig. 6 that Lf3 affects not
only the resonant frequency, but also the coupling between the
antenna and the ground, e.g., the resonant frequency of S11
becomes lower and its impedance matching gets better. Fig. 7
shows how the antenna performance is affected by width Wf3,
especially, no matter Wf3 is increased or decreased the antenna
performance always gets worse, meaning that 0.62mm is the (a) (b) (c)
moderate value for Wf3. In addition, Fig. 8 shows the antenna
radiation patterns at 37 GHz, 38.5 GHz, and 40 GHz. It can be Fig. 12. 3D radiation patterns of the proposed antenna array at 37 GHz with a
scanning angle of (a) 0 degree, (b) 30 degrees, and (c) 60 degrees.
seen from Fig. 8 that this antenna element has good radiation
behavior for all the above frequencies, which means that this
antenna element can be used to form an antenna array.

III. ARRAY CONFIGURATION IN A MOBILE DEVICE

The antenna array consists of eight antenna elements and
the distance between two adjacent antenna elements is d = 4
mm (corresponding to 0.49- and 0.53-wavelength of frequency (a) (b) (c)
37GHz and 40GHz, respectively), as shown in Fig. 9. The
Fig. 13. 3D radiation patterns of the proposed antenna array at 38.5 GHz with
antenna array can be fabricated on the top side of PCB of a a sanning angle of (a) 0 degree, (b) 30 degrees, and (c) 60 degrees.
mobile device, as illustrated in Fig.10, where the size of the
PCB of the mobile device is 130 mm × 65 mm. The S-
parameter of the proposed antenna array in the mobile device
is shown in Fig. 11. It can be seen from Fig. 11 that the
antenna array has quite good performance within the entire
frequency range of 37 GHz to 40 GHz.

(a) (b) (c)

(a)
Fig. 14. 3D radiation patterns of the proposed antenna array at 40 GHz with a
scanning angle of (a) 0 degree, (b) 30 degrees, and (c) 60 degrees.
(b)
One of characteristics of the 5G communication system is
Fig. 9. The 8x1 phased antenna array: (a) top layer, and (b) bottom layer. that the antenna array can realize beam forming and scanning
so the point-to-point communication between base station and
mobile device can be established. A very important criterion
for evaluating the scanning property of the phased antenna
array is to see if the side lobes of the 3D radiation patterns are
small for bigger scanning angle. Normally, we can say that the
scanning property is good if the side lobes are still small while
the scanning angle is as big as 60 degrees.
Fig. 12 shows the 3D radiation patterns of the phased array
antenna system illustrated in Fig. 10 at 37 GHz while the
scanning angles are 0 degree, 30 degrees and 60 degrees;
Fig. 10. Antenna array located on the PCB of a mobile phone. whereas the radiation patterns for 38.5 GHz and 40 GHz with
the above different scanning angles are demonstrated in Fig.
13, Fig. 14, respectively. One can see from Figs. 12, 13 and 14
that for all the cases the main beams are large and the side
lobes are quite small. The above phenomenon can be seen
more clearly from the 2D radiation patterns. Figs. 15, 16 and
17 show the 2D radiation patterns of the proposed phased
array antenna with different scan angles at 37 GHz, 38.5 GHz
and 40 GHz, respectively. It should be noted here that for a
typical phased array antenna, the side lobes of the array
antenna at higher frequency are larger than that at lower
frequency while the distance between adjacent antenna
elements is fixed. This is why one can see from Figs. 15, 16
and 17 that for all the cases the side lobes are all below 0dB,
Fig. 11. Simulated S parameters of the proposed antenna array in the mobile except for the case when the scanning angle is 60 degrees at
device. 40 GHz. Such a good scanning property can be seen as an
advantage of the proposed antenna array over the designs IV. CONCLUSION
proposed in [5-7]. A millimeter-wave phased array antenna system with good
radiation performance within the frequency range from 37
GHz to 40 GHz is presented. The antenna array is based on a
dipole-like antenna element with two opening holes on its
arms. Because the proposed antenna array has quite high
performance in terms of antenna gain and scanning property
within a wide frequency range, it is a good candidate for 5G
millimeter-wave mobile terminal application.

REFERENCES
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[3] F. Aranfar, J. Pi, H. Zhou, T. Henige, G. Xu, S. Abu-Surra, D.
Fig. 15. 2D radiation beams of the proposed antenna at 37 GHz with different Psychoudakis, F. Khan, “Millimeter-wave base station for mobile
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[8] CST User Mannul, Version 2016, http://www.cst.com.

Fig. 16. 2D radiation beams of the proposed antenna at 38.5 GHz with
different scan angles.

Fig. 17. 2D radiation beams of the proposed antenna at 40 GHz with different
scan angles.

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