Miniaturized reconfigurable UWB antennas for the integration into consumer electronic products

The emphasis of this research was to reduce the development cost of an antenna by investigating simple minimal cost external adjustments [5] to the antenna, in order to target a range of integration scenarios. The antenna integration is critical for low cost production as the antenna characteristics are hugely affected by its environment. The key point for low cost antenna integration is to make the antenna as insensitive as possible to its environment. This research reports cost effective techniques to reconfigure external UWB antennas when it is necessary. Embedding UWB antennas in packages using technologies like Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) can provide advantage in reaching this goal. The main technological advantage of this approach is the ability to include lumped elements in the multilayer structure that allow simple, low cost, realistic reconfigurable antennas (easy tuning or re-tuning the antenna) for different applications (PDA, DVD player, etc). This yields a UWB antenna which is volume efficient and is, effectively, insensitive to its environment when integrated into different consumer electronic products.