A Compact Reconfigurable Antenna-filter Co-design with Frequency Agility for 5G/6G Wireless Front-ends

Abstract

The fast development of 5G and the next generation 6G networks requires small, spectrally adaptive and interference-free RF front-end modules. The proposed paper introduces a co-designed reconfigurable antenna-filter system that combines the radiating and filtering functions into a small-size unit of 2020 mm 2-a 43 percent smaller than the conventional designs. The system includes PIN-diode based tunability and shared-feed integration plan, to achieve multi-band operation of 2.8-4.2 GHz, and the return losses are less than -15 dB and the insertion losses in all bands are less than 2 dB. Radiation efficiencies exceeding 85 per cent, without any additional complexity, can be achieved in microstrip on high-permittivity materials with fractal-edged geometries. This is a full-wave co-simulation (ANSYS HFSS/CST) with the performance of the modeled and measured results being in good agreement. This solution, in contrast to previous solutions which required fixed or partially integrated designs, allows real time frequency agility and also has low power consumption and high integration density. It has been mentioned as a possible biomedical use, such as wearable sensors and implantable telemetry, but these are only mentioned in frequency compliance and size restriction; no clinical uses are mentioned. The study presents a verified design approach to the current state-of-art of compact and adaptive RF front ends to next-generation wireless and internet of things platforms. Lee et al., (2024).