Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1496727
12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2023 is means not only designing the antenna design itself, but also the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi protocols, FCC compliance, and the system- level design to integrate all these different communication methods. You have all kinds of different IEEE protocols involved with that, and how they may interact or interfere with each other. How do you deal with SMA con- nectors, controlled impedances, wave cavities, and so on? Back in the radio days, it was literally just an amplifier, a transmitter, and a receiver. e design of the antenna was critical because it controlled your frequency and so on. at's why we used to have TV antennas back in the day, especially the old TV antennas that were triangle-shaped. ey used the triangle shape because each of those lengths of antenna picked up a different frequency. Nowadays, it's not only the design of the antenna, but it's which chip you need to use. ey actually sell not only 3D antennas, but pre-packaged anten- nas in chip packages. You can buy a Bluetooth antenna in the equivalent of, say, a 1206 or a chip package, and just solder it onto the board. Shaughnessy: It seems like the easiest way forward would be to use an off-the-shelf antenna, since it's been validated, I assume, and that preliminary work has been done. ere's more math involved in designing your own antenna, which is technically a "copper geometry device." If you're trying to design the antenna out of the board trace itself, there is a lot of engineering mathematics and analy- sis that goes into that. Specifically, to get the antenna to work right, you have to convert to the SAP or mSAP process so you don't get non- ideal geometries that you get from the standard subtractive process. You must be much more diligent about the width and the clearance, especially if you're serpentining your antenna rather than making one long straight trace, to save board space. With a serpentine pattern, now the gap width and the length before the turns will be much more critical than it is with just the sim- ple serpentining I would do for length match- ing. ere's a lot more mathematics involved if you're trying to design the actual antenna. If, on the other hand, all you're doing is buying parts and trying to connect them, you're still into RF board routing techniques, but without the complex mathematics of antenna design. Holden: Years ago, we had a problem design- ing the phase array for anti-collision sys- tems for cars because our EEs didn't have radar training. We eventually found a retired EE with the specific RF knowledge that we needed. Have you found that to be true today? Yes. You need that specialized RF training, or at least access to an RF engineering spe- cialist, to go through the three-dimensional geometry calculations for some of this design work. Barry Matties: Are antennas needed in every electronic device we have now? Kris Moyer