Design of an Enhanced Isolation 8-Unit MIMO Antenna for Smartphones Operating in 5G nR and LTE 42 Bands

Abstract

A miniaturized enhanced isolation 8-unit MIMO antenna for smartphones is proposed in this paper. The units are planar inverted-F antennas with the same structure, and we use the slotting method and shorted probe to miniaturize them. The size of every unit is 14 × 6 mm2 (0.149 × 0.064λ2). We insert an L-shaped decoupling element into the middle of adjacent radiating elements and connect the decoupling element to the GND. Note that the decoupling elements are on the outer side of the substrate, and the radiating elements are on the inner side of the substrate. Finally, a prototype is fabricated and measured. The measured results show that the bandwidth of the MIMO antenna is from 3.0 GHz to 5.3 GHz (55.4%), which fully supports the n77, n78, and n79 in the 5G nR frequency band and the 4G LTE 42 frequency band (S11 less than −6 dB). The measured isolation of the MIMO antenna is greater than 25 dB by using the decoupling method in this paper. The envelope correlation coefficient of the proposed MIMO antenna is less than 0.08, its radiation efficiency is greater than 50%, and its gain is between 4.2 and 5.3 dBi in the whole operating frequency band.