MIMO Antenna Using Modified Planar Inverted-F

Antennas
Hassan Tariq Chattha, Muhammad Nasir, Yasir
Jamal, Abubakar Sharif

Yi Huang, Saqer S. Aljaafreh

Department of Electrical Engineering & Electronics

Department of Electrical Engineering

University of Engineering & Technology (Lahore)
Faisalabad Campus
Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
chattha43@hotmail.com

University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK, L69 3GJ
Yi.huang@liverpool.ac.uk

literature which covers such a wide bandwidth in a single band

for a height of 5 mm.

AbstractA new Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) antenna

using two modified planar inverted-F antennas (PIFA) is
presented in this paper. Both modified PIFA antennas are
identical with each having two shorting plates instead of one
shorting plate and a slot on the top radiation plate for impedance
matching to increase the bandwidth of the antennas. Two slots
are inserted on the ground plane to further enhance the
impedance bandwidth. Isolation between the two modified PIFA
antennas is achieved with the use of a strip connecting the feed
plates of the two antennas. Both elements of the modified PIFA
cover the frequency band from around 1800 MHz to around 2800
MHz which covers LTE/PCS (1900), UMTS/IMT (2000),
LTE/AWS (2100), WiBro (2300), WLAN/Bluetooth (2450) and
LTE/WiMAX (2500-2700) and can be used as a 3G and 4G
antenna for MIMO and diversity applications.

I.

II.

The configuration of this MIMO antenna with two modified

PIFA branches is shown in Fig. 1. It has a ground plane with
width Wg and length Lg. Both PIFA antennas are identical.
However, their identical parameter exist diagonal to each other
which exploit pattern diversity in addition to the spatial
diversity. The dimensions of the top plate of each antenna are
WL. The substrate used is FR-4 having thickness t = 1.5 mm
and relative permittivity of r = 4.4. There is free space
between the antenna top plates and the substrate. Each PIFA
antenna has two shorting plates with the same dimensions of
Ws(h+t) where h is the height of the antenna and Ws is the
width of the shorting plate. The shorting plate 1 is placed on
one side of the upper edge of the top plate whereas the shorting
plate 2 is placed on the other side of the upper edge. The width
of feeding plate of each PIFA antenna is Wf having the height
h. The distance between shorting plate 1 and feed plate is Ls. A
slot is inserted on the top radiating plate of each PIFA antenna
at a distance T from side edge of the top plate and at a distance
S from the upper edge of the top plate having dimensions
TxTy. In order to the enhance the isolation, a strip connecting
the two feed plates is placed at a distance Xs from the side edge
of the ground plane with height hs and width Lw. Two slots are
inserted on the ground plane to further enhance the impedance
bandwidth by the two modified PIFA antennas. The bottom
view of the modified ground plane is shown in Fig. 2. The
dimensions of the slots placed on the ground plane are SxSy
and the distances of the slots from the upper edges of the
ground plane are Dy.

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade, a rapid growth is observed in

communications systems having wireless connectivity. There is
an increasing demand that future portable devices needs to
provide a wide range of services such as high transmission data
rate, quality of service, voice, pictures, videos and live
streaming. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems
have increasingly become very popular due to the fact that they
can provide very high date rates to cover the high transmission
rate demand of different high quality services to make them
enable in the future portable wireless devices [1]. There have
been reasonable researches already done on diversity antennas
for wireless communication systems [2-3]. Antenna diversity
can be realized in several ways. Depending on the
environment, space and the expected interference, designers
can employ one or more of these methods such as spatial,
polarization and pattern diversities to achieve diversity gain.
The planar inverted-F antenna is now widely used in mobile
and portable applications due to the fact that it has very
attractive features which include simple design, light-weight,
low-cost, comparatively directed radiation pattern and being
able to integrate with the PCB structure [4-5]. In this paper, a
two-element MIMO antenna is presented which uses two
identical modified PIFA elements each having two shorting
plates instead of one with a slot on top radiating plate. The
height of the antenna is h = 5 mm which makes it suitable for
small handheld devices. No such MIMO antenna exists in

978-1-4799-3540-6/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

DESIGN CONFIGURATIONS

III.

PARAMETERS AND RESULTS

The parameters of this two-element MIMO antenna are as

follows: Wgp = 40mm, Lgp = 100 mm, W= 40 mm, L = 27 mm, h
= 5mm, Wf = 18 mm, Ws = 5 mm, Ls = 6.5 mm, T = 18 mm, S =
11 mm, Tx = 3 mm, Ty = 8 mm, Xs = 19.5 mm, hs = 4 mm, Lw =
1 mm, Dy = 26 mm, Sx = 22 mm and Sy = 2 mm. The simulated
and measured results of S11 and S12 are shown in Fig. 3. As
both antennas are identical, the reflection coefficients S11 and
S22 are the same. It can be seen that the bandwidth achieved by
the antennas is around 1 GHz from around 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz

390

AP-S 2014

Tx

Ty

Xs

L
h

Ws

Wf

Ls

Fig. 1 Configuration of the MIMO antenna with two modified

PIFA elements
Shorting plate 1

Feed 1

Shorting plate 2

Fig. 4(a) Two-dimensional radiation pattern [dB] for XZ

(=0) plane for Antenna 1 and Antenna 2 at 2.2 GHz

Sy

Dy

Sx
Lgp
W gp

Dy
Shorting plate 2

Feed 2

Shorting plate 1

Fig. 2 Bottom view of the ground plane of the PIFA

Fig. 4(b) Two-dimensional radiation pattern [dB] for XY
(=90) plane for Antennas 1 and 2 at 2.2 GHz

which covers LTE/PCS (1900), UMTS (2000), LTE/AWS

(2100), WiBro (2300), WLAN/Bluetooth (2450) and
LTE/WiMAX (2500-2700). The 2D simulated radiation
patterns of the two modified PIFA antennas are shown in Fig.
4. It is evident that the radiation patterns by the two antennas
are quite different which shows that pattern diversity is also
exploited along with spatial diversity to obtain diversity gain.
This MIMO antenna also fulfils the two conditions of
achieving diversity gain as its envelope correlation is below 0.5
and the ratio of mean effective gains of the two branches is
approximately equal to 1.

IV.

CONCLUSION

A new MIMO antenna using two modified PIFA elements

with two shorting stubs has been developed for future
generation handheld devices for diversity and MIMO
applications.
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]

Fig. 3 Simulated and measured S11 and S12 [dB] versus

frequency [GHz]

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