New Self-Isolated Wideband MIMO Antenna System for 5G mm-Wave Applications Using Slot Characteristics

This paper proposes a simple novel technique for self-isolating a MIMO antenna for mm wave applications. MIMO antenna elements with inter-element separation of 0.2 mm (0.023 lambda at 35 GHz) and measured high isolation (> 50 dB) are presented. By observing the concentration of surface waves on the radiating patch, several rigorously optimized slots of different shapes, positions, and dimensions are etched on the patch to enhance the inter-element isolation and increase the bandwidth within 2837.5 GHz. The circuit models of the reference and proposed antennas have been presented. The coupling is measured by the level of the differences in the output voltage in both antennas. The novel mm-wave antenna exhibits high impedance bandwidth (> 29%), high isolation (> 50 dB), high efficiency (> 90%), and low envelope correlation coefficient (< 0.005). Two configurations of MIMO antenna (i.e., 1 x 2 and 1 x 4) are fabricated and measured to validate the simulation outcomes. The single reference antenna has dimensions of 10x12 mm(2) while the 1x2 array has dimensions of 19x12 mm(2). The presented design is the first to exhibit such wideband isolation improvement without any external decoupling structure at the mm-wave frequency range, to the best of the authors' knowledge.