Design of polygonal patch antennas for portable devices

In this paper, extending the design technique presented by the authors in a previous work, we propose the study of a new family of polygonal patch antennas for portable devices of communication systems. Such antennas are suitable to be mounted in modern terminals, enabling wideband/multi-frequency operation and new multimedia features. The desired electromagnetic behaviour of the proposed radiators is obtained by adding either shorting posts, properly located between the polygonal patch and the ground plane, or circular slots, drilled at the appropriate position on the patch surface. Circular slots are also useful to easily accommodate a photo-camera in the terminal, in order to enable multimedia services and video calls. Some practical layouts of polygonal patch antennas to be used in: a) modern PDAs and Smart Phones integrating cellular phone operation and wireless functionalities; b) UMTS terminals integrating also GSM functionalities, are, finally, presented. The effectiveness of the proposed designs is confirmed through proper full-wave numerical simulations.