Microwave Journal
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Taoglas Delivers Innovation Breakthrough for Antenna Performance

September 13, 2018

Taoglas has announced what the company describes as a “revolutionary breakthrough” in antenna design to deliver significantly increased antenna performance, an innovation particularly suited to designs with shorter ground planes, which enables IoT and other device designers to develop a wider range of smaller devices — products that would otherwise not meet stringent carrier certification requirements.

The device size versus performance dilemma has long been an issue in the IoT industry. It affects aesthetics, power consumption, cost and use cases. With the migration to 4G cellular networks, additional frequency bands are used by network providers to increase service level speeds and throughput. Many IoT devices require that antennas be able to send and receive efficiently at all bands to be globally compliant, without changing antennas for a specific region. Devices may also require fall-back to 2G/3G operation. As a result, many devices are larger than required or practical for the application they serve.

Taoglas Boost addresses this challenge by using new technique to alter the electrical delay in the ground plane, which improves efficiency at the lower frequencies typically used for cellular, i.e., 600 to 1000 MHz. The modification can be implemented in the “keep-out” area of the antenna, the area on the host circuit board reserved for antenna placement, causing minimal impact to the designer integrating the antenna.

A tuning feature is integrated into the design to allow for quick optimization when Taoglas Boost is implemented in a customer device. The result is an up to 2 dB improvement in antenna efficiency. Extra antenna gain improves system-level gain, and this improvement can be particularly useful to meeting over-the-air (OTA) requirements for small devices commonly found in M2M and IoT applications. This new invention and technology can be implemented with any onboard antenna.

“As a leading RF and antenna provider for IoT, Taoglas has long seen the demands smaller device sizes and increased power consumption place on antenna design. This patent-pending breakthrough, developed by our team of engineers, tricks the antenna into seeing a longer ground plane, hence increasing antenna efficiency. The technique is provided at no additional cost for use with Taoglas antennas, providing our customers one or more dBs of performance for free.” — Jeff Shamblin, vice president of engineering, Taoglas

Taoglas will show its patent-pending Taoglas Boost technology in Booth S.2606 at Mobile World Congress Americas, being held September 12-14 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.