Abstract In this thesis, bandwidth (BW) enhanced antennas for mobile terminals and multilayer ceramic packages are presented. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, electrically frequency-tunable mobile terminal antennas have been studied. The first three antennas presented were of a dual-band planar inverted-F type (PIFA) and were tuned to operate in frequency bands appropriate to the GSM850 (824–894 MHz), GSM900 (880–960 MHz), GSM1800 (1710–1880 MHz), GSM1900 (1850–1990 MHz) and UMTS (1920–2170 MHz) cellular telecommunication standards with RF PIN diode switches. The first antenna utilized a frequency-tuning method developed in this thesis. The method was based on an integration of the tuning circuitry into the antenna. The tuning of the second antenna was based on a switchable parasitic antenna element. By combining the two frequency-tuning approaches, a third PIFA could be switched to operate in eight frequency bands. The planar monopole antennas researched were varactor-tunable for digital television signal reception (470–702 MHz) and RF PIN diode switchable dual-band antenna for operation at four cellular bands. The key advantage of the former antenna was a compact size (0.7 cm3), while for the latter one, a tuning circuit was implemented without using separate DC wiring for controlling the switch component. The second part of the thesis is devoted to multilayer ceramic package integrated microwave antennas. In the beginning, the use of a laser micro-machined embedded air cavity was proposed to enable antenna size to impedance bandwidth (BW) trade-off for a microwave microstrip in a multilayer monolithic ceramic media. It was shown that the BW of a 10 GHz antenna fabricated on a low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate could be doubled with this technique. Next, the implementation of a compact surface mountable LTCC antenna package operating near 10 GHz was described. The package was composed of a BW optimized stacked patch microstrip antenna and a wide-band vertical ball grid array (BGA)-via interconnection. Along with the electrical performance optimization, an accurate circuit model describing the antenna structure was presented. Finally, the use of low-sintering temperature non-linear dielectric Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) thick films was demonstrated in a folded slot antenna operating at 3 GHz and frequency-tuned with an integrated BST varactor.

The studies in this dissertation mainly utilize planar antennas for ultra-wideband antenna designs not only on the investigation of antenna performance but also towards exploiting attractive features of ultra-wideband antennas for practical applications, such as WMAN access-point antennas, omnidirectional WiMAX access-point antennas, band-notched UWB (Ultra-wideband, 3.1 ~ 10.6 GHz) antennas, and so on. To begin with, the effects of the ground-plane size and the asymmetrical ground plane on ultra-wideband antennas are studied in Chapter 2. Following up, from the conclusive results, an antenna for WMAN operation in access-point applications and an omnidirectional monopole for USB wireless network card device are proposed and analyzed. Characteristics of ultra-wideband antenna radiation in relation to the antenna's width for obtaining omnidirectional radiation are addressed. In Chapter 3, several ultra-wideband access-point antennas are presented for achieving good omnidirectional radiation in the azimuthal plane across the bandwidth. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, band-notching techniques are applied to ultra-wideband antennas for avoiding the interference between the UWB and the WLAN systems.