Compatible with all major worldwide wireless carriers, the new off-the-shelf antennas have a small, low-profile FR4 form factor with patented IMD technology, reduced ground plane & keep-out area requirements, independent tuning capabilities, high efficiency, gain, & isolation, & minimal interference & provide ultra-wideband coverage from 600–2,700 MHz
AVX Corporation released a new embedded, universal broadband, LTE/LPWA antenna (1004795) as a standard, off-the-shelf solution designed for maximum versatility. Compatible with all major worldwide wireless carriers and a variety of common communications protocols, the new antennas meet steadily increasing cross-market demand for smaller and thinner antennas with high-reliability, ultra-wideband performance capabilities and help OEMs reduce both costs and time-to-market by eliminating engineering fees and extended cycles times associated with custom solutions.
The new universal broadband antennas have a small, low-profile, FR4 form factor that employs patented Isolated Magnetic Dipole™ (IMD) technology to achieve reduced ground plane size requirements and a small keep-out area for greater design flexibility, independent tuning capabilities for application-specific performance optimization, and high performance and isolation characteristics for better connectivity and minimal interference. The antennas also exhibit high-efficiency, high gain, and high isolation characteristics from 600–2,700 MHz and, although they are ideally suited for use in applications that leverage CAT-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) communication protocols – including wearables, smart meters, medical, industrial, and IoT devices, machine-to-machine and FirstNet communications systems, point-of-sale terminals, tracking systems, and automotive electronics – they also support Sigfox, LoRa, Cellular LPWA, RPMA, and Broadband LTE (OCTA-BAND) protocols.
The extremely versatile, high-performance antennas measure just 36.0 mm (±0.3 mm) long, 9.0 mm (±0.2 mm) wide, and 3.2 mm (±0.3 mm) high, weigh 2.1 g, and support low-band frequencies extending from 600–1,000 MHz, high-band frequencies extending from 1,700–2,200 MHz, and ultra-high-band frequencies extending from 2,500–2,700 MHz. They are also RoHS compliant and available in a mirrored version (1004796) for even greater design flexibility and with optional evaluation boards for easy, efficient testing.
Typical performance characteristics for the standard (1004795) antenna on a 125 mm × 45 mm PCB include linear polarization, 2 W continuous waveform (CW) power consumption, 50 Ω unbalanced feed-point impedance, peak gain ranging from 2.4 dBi (1,710–2,220 MHz) to 0.9 dBi (2,500–2,700 MHz), average efficiency extending from 48% (2,500–2,700 MHz) to 61% (600–698 MHz), and VSWR match spanning <5.5:1 (600–698 MHz) to <2.5:1 (1,710–2,200 MHz).
The new SMT antennas are shipped in tape and reel packaging compatible with automated pick-and-place processing and currently have a nine-week lead-time.
