Inspired Metamaterial Quad-Band Printed Inverted-F (IFA) Antenna for USB Applications

This paper presents quad-band printed inverted-F antenna that employs transmission-line based on inspired metamaterials for USB applications. The reactive loading of the printed IFA is inspired by transmission-line based metamaterials (TL-MTM), which is exploited to create a new resonant frequency while maintaining the antenna's small form-factor. The proposed USB antenna structure consists of two arms printed IFA CPW-fed loaded with two TL-MTM unit cells to achieve two operating bands with the same antenna size in addition to the two fundamental resonant frequencies of IFA arms themselves. The structure is designed to operate at LTE 11 0.9 GHz, Bluetooth 2.4 GHz, WIMAX 3.5 GHz, and WLAN 5.2 GHz. The component interaction including housing case, USB connector, and laptop device are also characterized. The design concept, a parametric study of the proposed antenna is carried out using HFSS ver. 14 and CST ver. 2014, and general design guidelines are provided. Experimental results are presented to validate the new design concept. Measurements and EM simulations are in a good agreement.