Milimeter-Wave Beamforming MIMO Antenna Design for 5G Wireless Applications

The design of beam steerable Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna design is presented for 5G communication systems working at 38 GHz frequency. In this research, the presented antenna is developed from a driven element with coaxial probe, while four parasitic elements surrounded the driven element with shorting pin integration embedded inside the substrate which represent by a copper strip material. The four parasitic elements act either as reflector or director depending on the shorting pin configuration as reflect to Yagi-Uda patch antenna concept. By adjusting the status of shorting pin location either ON or OFF mode simultaneously on the parasitic elements, the radiation pattern can be varied, thus achieving the radiation configurability. This shorting pin contribute to the antenna’s electrical dimensional changes that manage to control the beam steering and return loss performance. By managing the ON and OFF state condition of the integrated shorting pin, nine beam steering angles can be achieved. The proposed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna consists of two identical patch elements with certain D separation distance on the Rogers RT5880. The significant parameters performance such as mutual coupling and correlation coefficient are been observed. Both antenna designed and simulated using CST Studio Suite operated within 37 to 39 GHz resonant frequency. The 2×2 MIMO antenna provides the most optimum results with bandwidth impedance of 1.783 GHz (4.7%) and achieve the reflection coefficient of −20 dB at 38 GHz application. The efficiency of the presented antenna has successfully achieved more than 80% with high gain of more than 7dBi. The presented antenna could be potential for point to point wireless base station terminal system.