PCB Antennas

PCB Antennas Manufacturer

C&T RF Antennas Inc is the internal & printed circuit board antennas PCB antennas manufacturer in China.

What is a PCB antenna?

In telecommunication, a microstrip antenna (also known as a printed antenna) usually means an antenna fabricated using photolithographic techniques on a printed circuit board (PCB).

PCB antenna is a kind of internal antenna. They are mostly used at microwave frequencies.

Antennas are critical components for many wireless systems, with printed-circuit-board (PCB) antennas leading the pack due to their small size and ease of integration with other high-frequency circuits.

The performance and consistency of a PCB antenna depend heavily on the quality of its foundation circuit laminate, with size very much a function of the target frequency and wavelength of the antenna.

PCB Antenna Design

As consumers clamor for the latest and greatest in wireless, it’s fueling a need for PCB antennas that can be easily mounted inside wireless communications products.

There’s no doubt a voracious appetite for wireless applications—from PCS to IoT and M2M applications. That’s where PCB antennas step in—designers often turn to them as practical solutions to handle the ever-growing array of wireless applications.

High-frequency PCB antennas can be as simple as a microstrip patch fabricated on one side of a circuit laminate with a slightly larger ground plane underneath it, on the other side of a dielectric layer.

The low profile of such antennas makes them attractive for mounting within systems that have any available flat surface.

How to do the FPCB/PCB embedded antenna design?

1. Know the common antenna types available

Standard designs that are widely available include monopole, L-type, and F-type. Standard F-type antennas are the most extensively used, and offer the best trade-off between size, efficiency, and are fairly omnidirectional.

A meandering trace can be used to compact the PCB area, but this will be at the cost of performance.

2. Consider the Construction of your Circuit Board

The PCB trace length will determine the resonant frequency; the higher the frequency the shorter the trace. Each antenna requires a keep-out area on the PCB.

This is defined as an area around the antenna trace where no copper traces or ground fill can be used on any layer of the PCB. Wider traces are often better, as they typically give a wider bandwidth. The trace can either be gold flashed or covered with a solder mask.

The antenna’s electrical performance will be determined by the substrate material used, its thickness, and the dielectric constant (εR).

3. The Ground Plane is Critical!

PCB trace antennas are ground plane dependent, as they must have a ground plane to be effective. The shape and size of the ground plane relative to the antenna will affect the impedance and performance of the PCB antenna. The ground plane should have vias along the entire edge of the antenna keep-out area.

The basic procedure looks like this:

Pick an IC

Look at the Datasheet of your chip, find the example layout section
Does your application have physical size limitations? Does your Antenna have to be directional?

Use the answers to the above questions to choose your antenna type (whip, wire, chip, PCB trace)

Design your PCB layout based on the example layout. Size the feedline for your application

Build some boards

Test the antenna with an SMA connector and a spectrum analyzer, if possible. (in your enclosure if you’re using one)

Use your testing results to correct your design.

C&T RF Antennas Inc manufactures the 5G NR antennas, 4G LTE antennas, 3G UMTS GSM antennas, 2G GPRS NB-IoT antennas, LoRa/LoRaWan antennas (includes 169MHz antennas, 230MHz antennas, 315MHz antennas, 433MHz antennas, 868MHz antennas, 915MHz antennas), 2.4GHz 5GHz Wi-Fi antennas, GNSS antennas, GPS antennas, Cellular antennas, UHF VHF antennas, UWB antennas, etc.

And the C&T RF Antennas Inc supplies the antenna accessories such as RF power amplifiers and repeaters, RF connectors and adapters, cable assemblies.

To help you select the best internal PCB antennas for your application, please contact us for the PCB antenna datasheet, PCB antenna pricing & PCB antenna datasheet, or the PCB antenna design types.