The Dawn of Multi-Function, Multi-Standard Shared Aperture Antenna Systems

Nowadays, we have wireless connectivity with almost everything around us. We are connected to our home appliances, to our offices, to our healthcare providers among many other services and online streaming services. Our cars are connected to the network, connectivity is everywhere. This also means there is a large magnitude of wireless standards and bands that antenna systems within our devices and objects need to cover and be compatible with. Multi-antenna or wideband antenna systems were a hot topic in the past few years, but to cover the large frequency band differences between 4G (sub 6-GHz) and 5G millimeter wave (24, 28 and 38 GHz) bands, researchers have started exploring utilizing the same aperture to host multi-standard antenna systems to save space and costs. The term shared aperture, or antenna-in-antenna (AiA) has become a new topic with a wide spectrum of applications in future wireless systems and devices. In this talk, we will discuss the principles and methods of shared aperture antenna systems, and the concept of AiA with several detailed examples and design methods from recent literature. We will discuss the advantages of disadvantages of such systems from practical and performance aspects. In addition, we will touch upon some recent techniques of such shared aperture antenna systems with different technologies by introducing the concepts of Encapsulated Dielectric Resonator Antennas (EDRAs), shared slot multi-band antenna elements, as well as Connected Antenna Arrays (CAA) based shared slot shared aperture antenna systems. Co-sponsored by: University of Washington and Washington State University Speaker(s): Prof. Mohammad Sharawi, Room: 403, Bldg: Electrical and Computer Engineering, 185 W Stevens Wy NE, Seattle, Washington, United States, 98195, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/431617