Various compact and packaging-adaptive antennas have been designed for practical wireless communications systems such as global system of mobile communications (GSM), Bluetooth Industrial-Scientific-Medical (ISM) devices, IEEE802.11a WLAN, and Local Multipoint Distribution Systems (LMDS) applications. First, compact stacked patch antennas using LTCC multilayer technology have been presented. A set of design rules is established for the purpose of designing optimized bandwidth compact antennas on LTCC multilayer substrates. To verify its effectiveness, the proposed design rules are applied to three emerging wireless bands. The return loss and the impedance bandwidth are optimized for all three bands. A maximum bandwidth of 7% can be achieved for an antenna operating in the LMDS band. Furthermore, folded shorted patch antennas (SPAs) are designed to significantly reduce the resonant frequency of a standard patch antenna. The design methodology of this structure starts with a conventional half-wave and through a series of procedures, evolves into a smaller, lambda/8 wavelength resonant length structure. Upon varying the height of the lower patch, the resonant length can be reduced to lambda/16. A comparison between a folded SPA and a standard SPA validates the folding technique proposed in this document. The folded SPA is applied to the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The measured results are in good agreement with simulated results. This antenna can be implemented into 3D packages using multilayer laminates such as LTCC or LCP.