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Optimized Routing and Component Placement to Improve the Continuity And Uniformity of the PCBPIFL Antennas Co-Planar Ground Plane to Achieve an Overall Improved Antenna Performance

SegeraDavies, MwangiMbuthia

A ground plane forms the other half for quarter wave PCB antennas. Integration of these type of antennas with other components within the same PCB of a mobile device compromise the uniformity and continuity of the ground plane due to the requirement for dense routing and component mounting to optimize the use of the limited PCB space available. This will not only detune the matching and introduce losses to the antenna, but also degrade the antenna’s performance in terms of gain, bandwidth, efficiency and radiation pattern. To address this issue, this paper presents a case study of an optimized components placement and stacking, effective PCB partitioning, routing discipline combined with right selection of antenna location to achieve a successful integration of a PCB-PIFL antenna into a mixed multilayer PCB design, which provides improved continuity and uniformity of the antenna’s co-planar ground plane, and the antenna’s and improves the overall performance. The results obtained show that the lower and upper bandwidths determined at -10dB is over 60MHz and 130MHz with return losses of -30dB and -14dB at resonant frequencies 915MHz and 1.931GHz.