No / This work presents a novel broadband monopole antenna for digital video broadcastingterrestrial (DVB-T) application. The proposed antenna consists of a grating patch and a concave rectangular ground plane with defected ground plane, and the Multiple Split-Ring Resonator (MSRR). The added part in the ground plane and the meta-material are used to enable the antenna height reduction for fixed ranges of operating frequency. The antenna can operate from 468 MHz to 894 MHz frequency range corresponding to 62.5% of impedance bandwidth for |S11|<-7.5 dB. Details of the proposed antenna designs and experimental results of the constructed prototypes are presented and discussed.

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.

This thesis proposes a variety of antenna designs suitable for modern of mobile products, such as mobile phones, PDAs and so forth, on both the 2G and 3G communication systems according to the mobile communication development. Based on the integration of monopole or planar inverted-F antenna with the system ground planes, multi-frequency, broadband, and high radiation efficiency can be achieved, which is very promising to be adapted into communication products. Furthermore, an antenna capable of WLAN and UWB is proposed for future wireless communication applications.

This paper proposes novel PIFA and monopole designs for dual-band or multi-band wireless communications, especially for mobile phones and CF (compact flash) card. The dual-frequency designs for mobile phone mainly utilize one or more metal branch strips to excite two resonant modes. By tuning the dimensions of branch strips, the ratio of the antenna¡¦s first two resonant frequencies can be achieved to be about 2.0, which makes it very promising for 900/1800 MHz operations. In addition, the broadband and quad-band (AMPS/GSM/DCS/PCS) designs for mobile phone application are also proposed. The broadband antenna design, unlike the above-mentioned dual-frequency designs for operating at two separate resonant modes, is more suitable to cover several nearby communication bands (DCS/PCS/UMTS/WLAN 2.45 GHz). The quad-band antenna design utilizes a £k-shape matching bridge to achieve a wider bandwidth both in lower and higher bands. For CF Card application, the triangular chip antenna having one longer and one shorter strip lines can generate the lower and higher modes covering the WLAN 2.4 and WLAN 5.2/5.8 GHz bands. All the antenna designs proposed are very promising to be concealed within the housing of the mobile phones or CF card.

Novel printed monopole antennas, including diversity antennas, monopole array antennas and broadband antennas for WLAN operation, are experimentally studied and presented in this dissertation. These proposed antennas can be printed on dielectric substrates and practically integrated with system circuit boards by using printed circuit board technique. Also, the proposed antennas are low cost in fabrication and the reliability of system circuit boards can be improved. First, the design of the diversity antenna, which mainly comprises two substantially orthogonal printed monopoles and are placed symmetrically with respect to a protruded ground plane of T shape, shows good isolation between the two feeding ports of the proposed antenna. Second, the design of the printed array antenna, which comprises three equally-spaced equilateral-triangular monopoles, is proposed. Among the three monopoles, the center one has a larger size, which mainly controls the lower operation band, and the other two monopoles have a smaller size for higher operation band and show higher antenna gain and wider operating bandwidth. Finally, the quasi-self-complementary antenna is introduced. With compact size and wide bandwidth achieved, the proposed antenna is suitable for a mobile communication device, and can also provide good spatial diversity to combat the multi-path interference problem when mounting two proposed antennas appropriately spaced on a WLAN card.

The research of this thesis is on the mobile TV antenna designs. There are three antenna designs proposed in this thesis. The first two designs are for portable TV sets. They are different from the traditional straight monopole antenna because the two proposed designs can be built-in with the portable TV set. The third one is for laptop applications. It can be stored inside a laptop when the antenna is not in use, and can be pulled out of the laptop when in operation. Thus the proposed antenna will not affect the appearance of the laptop.

Three novel wideband antennas suitable for DTV (Digital Television) signal reception in the 470 ~ 806 MHz band for Portable Media Playrer (PMP) applications are presented in this thesis. The antennas include a novel broadband planar monopole antenna in Chpater 2, a novel low-profile planar inverted-U monopole antenna in Chpater 3, and a novel internal planar inverted-F antenna in Chpater 4. These antennas all have wide impedance bandwidths, good radiation efficiencies, and good radiation patterns. In addition, we propose a one-layer simplified hand model for achieving efficient and reliable simulation study for PMP antennas. The studied antenna in Chapter 2 is selected to be the example to study the user¡¦s hand effect on the antenna for PMP application.

A six-band antenna design for the mobile phone is presented. The required bandwidth for DTV/GSM850/900/DCS/PCS/UMTS operation is achieved by using two antennas. For DTV/GSM850/900 operation, we propose a novel antenna by using the concept of the dipole antenna and an internal matching portion to excite the half- and one-wavelength resonant modes of the antenna. With the internal matching portion, the frequency ratio of the two resonant modes can be controlled, thereby making the two resonant modes formed into a very wide operating band. For DCS/PCS/UMTS operation, a novel monopole slot antenna is used. The lower-edge frequency of the slot antenna depends on its length and the required bandwidth can be achieved by adjusting its tuning section. Effects of casing and human body on the proposed mobile phone antenna are also discussed. It is found that the radiation efficiency of DTV/GSM bands is larger than that of DCS/PCS/UMTS bands in this design. However, overall the operating bands, the antenna performances are greatly affected when the human effects are taken into considerations.

In this thesis, the study mainly focuses on developing multiband chip antennas for mobile handsets. Three possible solutions and their extended and integrated designs are presented. By using the dielectric material as the chip base, the chip antenna can be smaller in size and simpler in design. Most of the applications of the traditional chip antennas are rarely used as the mobile phone antenna and are commonly designed with a single operating band to cover GPS or WLAN operation only. Different types of the antennas are proposed in the thesis. The metal patterns of the monopole and loop antennas are manufactured inside the chip base with an occupied volume of generally less than 0.8 cc, some even as small as 0.3 cc. Electronic components like the lens of the embedded camera and the speaker can be integrated close to the chip antenna with little influences on the radiation characteristics. Consequently, the developed chip antennas are suitable for mobile communications and can cover not only GSM850/900/1800/1900/ UMTS bands but also WLAN/WiMAX bands.