Synthesis, Control, and Excitation of Characteristic Modes for Platform-Integrated Antenna Designs: A design philosophy

Electrically compact antennas that exploit the characteristic modes (CMs) of their platforms have recently attracted much attention in military and terminal device antenna research. Conventionally, to design an antenna on a platform, the antenna element is first synthesized in a stand-alone manner, without explicitly considering the platform structure. Electromagnetic compatibility issues may arise since the size of the antenna is usually comparable to the wavelength of operation. In contrast, CM-based platform-integrated antenna design takes advantage of the natural resonant modes of the platforms to achieve the desired properties, such as multiband/wideband operation, polarization or pattern reconfigurability, high isolation between ports (in the case of multiport antennas), and achievement of the specified gain.