Dual-band Phased Array Antenna on Metal for mmWave Mobile Application

The demand for faster mobile data traffic has become stronger than ever, and multiple bandwidth antennas architecture at millimeter wave (mm-wave) is considered to be one of the critical breakthrough technologies in the upcoming era of the 5G technology, although plenty of room for improvement still remains. In this paper, a folded "dual-slot" phased array antenna on a metal frame for portable mobile device which can operate at mm-wave of 28 GHz and 39 GHz simultaneously is proposed. The proposed array antenna consists of 4 × 2 folded slot antennas placed at the edge of the metal frame. The measured -10 dB bandwidth is 1.3 GHz (27.2 GHz - 28.5 GHz, gain of 11.3 dBi at 28 GHz) and 6.8 GHz (34.7 GHz - 41.5 GHz, gain of 12.4 dBi at 39 GHz), respectively. Our computational simulations and prototypical measurements demonstrate that the proposed "dual-slot" architecture is an efficient method to optimize the antenna performance of currently available metal body mobile devices.