Compact Magneto-Electric Dipole Array With Wide Beam Scanning Range for 5G NR Bands

Abstract

In this paper, a dual-band dual-polarized antenna array based on magneto-electric (ME) dipoles is proposed, which is simply excited by two orthogonal $L$ -shaped strips. The antenna element has a compact size of $0.45\,\,\lambda \times 0.45\,\,\lambda \times 0.12\,\,\lambda $ at 34 GHz. By adding inductive blind vias at the four corners of the ground plane, better impedance matching, larger front-to-back ratio (FBR) and higher gain at the low frequency band are achieved. Due to the resonances of the magnetic dipole and the electric dipole, large bandwidths of 24.4-28.9 GHz and 34.2-43.4 GHz are obtained for the ±45° polarized antennas, covering the n258 and n260 bands for 5G communications. At the same time, a stable radiation pattern is retained, with a high gain of above 5 dBi over the operating band for both polarizations. With the $1\times4$ array, the beam scanning range from −60° to +60° is retained at 26.5 GHz, whereas it is from −53° to +53° at 39 GHz, making it competitive for implementations in mobile handsets.

Keywords

• Antenna array
• beam steering
• dual-polarized antenna
• magneto-electric (ME) dipole antenna
• mm-wave antenna