RF Antenna Design on the Bleeding Edge

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

At SMTA Atlanta Tech Expo and Forum, I met with PCB designer Albert Gaines, owner of HiGain Design Services. Albert has been working on some really interesting, fragmented aperture antenna designs, and some of this stuff is really pushing the limits.

Albert and I discussed his work with RF, the differences between COTS and custom antennas, and his efforts to educate engineers about what they can and can’t do.

Andy Shaughnessy: Hi, Albert. Good to see you. I understand you’re doing some pretty interesting antenna design work. Tell us about it.

Albert Gaines: We're doing some really fancy designs, compared to what we used to do; we’re doing the sequential lay-up up of board layers with Rogers and other types of high-frequency laminates. They are actually back drilling, filling, and planarizing blind vias on internal layers, and then stacking materials as we need them for the dielectrics we need. Instead of depending on this particular core, we're actually using a single layer of double layer cores, stacking up sometimes two or three layers of special prepreg.

Then it gets pretty interesting. This is all about trying to get away from having a large parabolic antenna. You have a flat circuit board with all these receivers or transmit elements all over it, and we basically create a grid. It’s like the dot matrix of your LED TV—they get signals from each one of those combined and through software and then get an antenna. The largest one so far has a 242-transmitter array on one side and a 242-receiver array on the other side.

Shaughnessy: Who are the typical customers for this sort of thing?

Gaines: As you can expect, there are some big players in this market. There is still a great push to get satellite access more transportable and smaller. Some customers are looking at it from a commercial standpoint, like the trucking or the airline industry. It’s just a portable antenna for wherever you might need it; you can open up a case, lay it on the ground or just take it out, mount it on a truck or whatever. The whole antenna structure is about 40" x 30". They are also developing smaller arrays for specific applications.

It’s interesting when you start working with 4-mil spaces and other small features. I always tell everybody that my favorite button is Zoom, but it's relative to whatever space you have to work with, and when you see a board that’s 40" x 30"—wow, that's a pretty big element.

But it's been very interesting, and the technology has really changed. We have some good board shops that we're working with, and they’re willing to push the envelope in a niche market. It has opened my eyes over the last couple of years about what can be done in a circuit board environment, as opposed to limitations you are put on by an average board shop.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the July 2023 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.