At the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2018 in Philadelphia, we built a directional antenna to use as part of a demo we did with Analog Devices. I want to share another example we implemented using this workflow.
The agreement between the analyzed and measured results is reasonable, with approximately 4% absolute error in the S11 minimum. Design analysis and measured S 11 results are plotted. The results comparing the design analysis and the measured performance are plotted in Figure 6.Ħ. The S 11 reflection coefficient of the prototype antenna was measured in the Antenna Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). You can then configure the Gerber file generation process for the Seeed Fusion PCB manufacturing services:įigure 5 shows the antenna we received from this design.ĥ. Shown is the PCB design for the front and back, rendered in Gerber viewer.
RF TOOLBOX MATLAB ANTENNA FREE
The design files are generated for the antenna PCB.įigure 4 shows this design rendered within the Mayhewlabs free 3D online Gerber viewer.Ĥ. The files are generated as illustrated in Figure 3.ģ. The PCB services catalog supports configuring the Gerber file generation process for manufacturing as well as for online viewer-only. You can select these from a catalog of PCB services and RF connectors provided in Antenna Toolbox.
The type of RF connector determines the pad layouts on the PCB. The first is the connector type the second is the PCB manufacturing service/viewer service. To generate these files, two additional pieces of information are required apart from the PCB itself. In the next step, you generate the Gerber files for the PCB’s geometry information. The properties of the PCB stack are as follows: This is the microstrip antenna with feedline. This antenna has the microstrip feedline brought out to the edge of the board as shown in Figure 2.Ģ. Both the feed location and diameter are defined as well. The PCB stack is defined using the dielectric material and arranging the layers in a top-down description, starting with the top-most layer of metal. Shown here is the antenna’s ground plane geometry. The ground plane geometry is shown in Figure 1.ġ. The first metal layer is the microstrip feedline, and the second layer of metal is the ground plane with a wide slot cut out from it. This antenna has two metal layers on either side of a single-layer PCB. To show this workflow, we start with a model of a microstrip-fed printed wide slot antenna on an FR4 substrate. Using this design, I will generate a set of Gerber files for a PCB antenna from MATLAB.
Or you can even import your design starting with a photo of an existing antenna, which I will write about in a future blog.įor this blog, the design is for an L-band system with a bandwidth of about 17% of the carrier frequency. You can start with an antenna element from the built-in library in Antenna Toolbox. You can define the geometric shape of your metal structures. This can be done for arbitrary metal-dielectric layers, solid feed/via models, and different connector types. You can now fabricate printed-circuit-board (PCB) antennas with MATLAB and Antenna Toolbox. I want to take a slight diversion and share another interesting workflow, but on a much smaller scale. My recent blogs have focused on MIMO phased-array designs.
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