A Tri-Band Shared-Aperture Antenna for Wi-Fi MIMO and Beam-Scanning Wi-Gig Applications

A tri-band shared-aperture antenna (2.4, 5.2 and 60 GHz) is proposed in this paper. It is the first time to put these three bands of antennas within the same radiator, and then realize the operation of both 2.4/5.2 GHz Wi-Fi application combined with the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology and 60 GHz wireless gigabit (Wi-Gig) application simultaneously. By using the structure-reused technology, the spiraled dual-band inverted-F antenna (PIFA) at the Wi-Fi frequency band and the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) leaky-wave antenna at the Wi-Gig frequency band can share the same radiator without adding extra aperture area. Thus, the radiation aperture utilization ratio can increase from 0 to 92.4%. What’s more, the MIMO technology is also applied to the Wi-Fi antenna design. The calculated ECC are all lower than 0.04, and the radiation efficiencies are 85-95% and 87-97% at these two bands respectively. Thanks to the MIMO design for the Wi-Fi operation, Wi-Gig antennas can obtain the high gain (a peak gain of 12.29 dBi) and the wide range of beam coverage (±36° from 57 to 64 GHz) at the same time. The antenna design has been validated by the experimental results.