Embedded, universal broadband, LTE/LPWA antenna handles CAT-M, NB-IoT Apps

AVX Corporation released a new embedded, universal broadband, LTE/LPWA antenna (1004795) as a standard, off-the-shelf solution designed for maximum versatility. Compatible with all major worldwide wireless carriers and a variety of common communications protocols, the new antennas meet steadily increasing cross-market demand for smaller and thinner antennas with high-reliability, ultra-wideband performance capabilities and help OEMs reduce both costs and time-to-market by eliminating engineering fees and extended cycles times associated with custom solutions.

The new universal broadband antennas have a small, low-profile, FR4 form factor that employs patented Isolated Magnetic Dipole (IMD) technology to achieve reduced ground plane size requirements and a small keep-out area for greater design flexibility, independent tuning capabilities for application-specific performance optimization, and high performance and isolation characteristics for better connectivity and minimal interference. The antennas also exhibit high-efficiency, high gain, and high isolation characteristics from 600–2,700MHz and, although they are ideally suited for use in applications that leverage CAT-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) communication protocols — including wearables, smart meters, medical, industrial, and IoT devices, machine-to-machine and FirstNet communications systems, point-of-sale terminals, tracking systems, and automotive electronics — they also support Sigfox, LoRa, Cellular LPWA, RPMA, and Broadband LTE (OCTA-BAND) protocols.

The extremely versatile, high-performance antennas measure just 36.0mm (±0.3mm) long, 9.0mm (±0.2mm) wide, and 3.2mm (±0.3mm) high, weigh 2.1g, and support low-band frequencies extending from 600–1,000MHz, high-band frequencies extending from 1,700–2,200MHz, and ultra-high-band frequencies extending from 2,500–2,700MHz. They are also RoHS compliant and available in a mirrored version (1004796) for even greater design flexibility and with optional evaluation boards for easy, efficient testing. Typical performance characteristics for the standard (1004795) antenna on a 125mm x 45mm PCB include linear polarization, 2W continuous waveform (CW) power consumption, 50Ω unbalanced feed-point impedance, peak gain ranging from 2.4dBi (1,710–2,220MHz) to 0.9dBi (2,500–2,700MHz), average efficiency extending from 48% (2,500–2,700MHz) to 61% (600–698MHz), and VSWR match spanning <5.5:1 (600–698MHz) to <2.5:1 (1,710–2,200MHz),

The new SMT antennas are shipped in tape and reel packaging compatible with automated pick-and-place processing and currently have a nine-week lead-time.