Energy-Efficient 5G Phased Arrays Incorporating Vertically Polarized Endfire Planar Folded Slot Antenna for mmWave Mobile Terminals

Abstract

An energy-efficient 5G phased array incorporating a novel vertically polarized (V-pol) endfire planar folded slot antenna (PFSA) for user devices (UE) is presented. First, we analytically amend existing millimeter-wave (mmWave) hybrid beamforming architectures that have precluded the uniqueness of 5G antennas and UEs. The total power consumption of the derived switchable 5G UE antenna system is estimated to be reduced by approximately 70 in comparison with a recently reported fully digital mmWave 5G UE antenna system under identical conditions. This is attributed to the ability to deactivate certain RF chains based on the directive nature of antenna elements. The PFSA featuring a height profile of less than 1/ $9\lambda _{ {0}}$ is derived from a planar folded slot structure. The designed and fabricated $1\times 4$ PFSA array features an impedance bandwidth of approximately 4 GHz with a center frequency of 37-39 GHz and the gain of 7.7 dBi with antenna efficiency of 94.12 at 39 GHz. An mmWave 5G beamforming module is demonstrated using the presented energy-efficient 5G beamforming architecture and V-pol endfire PFSA array. The fabricated module achieves a measured EIRP of 18.2 dBm and a scanning range of 50 in azimuth at 28 GHz.