Novel antennas attractive to fit in the internal space of a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) for WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) operations are presented in this dissertation. The proposed antennas have in common good impedance bandwidth (defined by 10 dB return loss), covering the dual-band WLAN operation in the 2.4/5.2 GHz bands. Two novel designs of foam-base surface-mount antennas are proposed in Chapters 2 and 3. Surface-mountable antennas, compared with ceramic antennas, are generally low cost in fabrication and rigid in nature. Low-profile and good dual-band operation of the proposed surface-mountable antennas can be observed in Chapters 2 and 3, and in addition, a few present-day WLAN bands at 5 GHz are covered in the operating bandwidths of the proposed foam-base surface-mountable shorted monopole antenna, shown in Chapter 3. Finally, in Chapter 4, a novel planar helical antenna printed on both surfaces of a dielectric substrate is demonstrated. This patent-pending helical antenna is very suitable to print and integrate on a circuit board of a PDA device for 2.4/5.2 GHz WLAN operation.

In this thesis, a comparison of the body SAR value of five planar WLAN antennas including two coupled-fed shorted monopole antennas, a coupled-fed loop antenna, a monopole antenna, and a monopole slot antenna for tablet PC applications are presented. A required minimum distance between the antenna and the testing flat phantom to meet the 1-g body SAR requirement of 1.6 W/kg has been determined. Results show that the body SAR results of the coupled-fed loop antenna are lowest among the five tested antennas. Detailed results and discussion are presented in this thesis. Also, a comparison of the body SAR value of a planar antenna and an antenna with 3-D bent structure are presented.