Scottish Scientists Create World's Smallest Smart Antenna 91
judgecorp writes "Each generation of smartphones actually has more dropped calls and worse battery life than the last, because antenna design has fallen behind, says Edinburgh-based Sofant Technologies. The firm has made a tunable, steerable RF antenna using micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) which it says will change all that. It's based on research from Edinburgh University and is designed to get the best out of LTE/4G."
That's not an antenna. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, each generation of smart phones has shorter battery life because they put bigger brighter screens on them and are connecting to higher-speed networks that require faster processing or more hardware to encode and decode the data. Display power dominates most smartphones and is closely followed by general processing power when used as a web appliance rather than as a phone.
And as an RF engineer, I have this to say about their antenna claims:
If that picture in the article is any indication, it's much too small to be an efficient antenna in even the highest 4G bands. An antenna can't be made arbitrarily smaller than a half-wave resonator. Its job is to induce fields that will radiate in space. If it's much smaller than a half-wave, the fields will be too bound to the resonating structure. This means that much larger currents are required to induce the same field so the Q of the antenna has to go up, which means the bandwidth goes down. That makes it more vulnerable to detuning due to objects in the near field, i.e. within about a half-wave of the antenna. What they are showing is almost certainly a near-field coupling device that works by coupling RF to a much antenna.