Scientists have developed a revolutionary button-sized wireless antenna that can transfer data or files up to a few gigabytes within seconds
New technologies with mobile wireless communications and high data rates make it essential to have a small-sized wireless antenna with high data rate transfer. To achieve this, Srikanta Pal, a professor of electronics and communication engineering at Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) Mesra along with Mrinmoy Chakraborty, a Ph.D. scholar of the same department at BIT Mesra has developed a button-size wireless antenna that is 100 times faster than Bluetooth that can be used for office automation, including school, hospitals, and other entities. It would also make internal connectivity safe by enabling high-speed communication that is not dependent on the internet and eliminates wires and cables for short-range (less than 100m) wireless personal area networks (WPANs).
Srikanta Pal, an electronics and communication engineering professor at Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) Mesra, said, “Our antenna is the world’s smallest (14 mm X 11 mm) with about a 10:1 bandwidth. It has a constant impedance bandwidth, gain, and omnidirectional radiation pattern.” For general understanding, the UWB antenna is 100 times faster than Bluetooth and has a range of 100 meters. “The standard ultra-wide spectrum operates in the frequency range of 3.1Ghz to 10.6GHz whereas the UWB antenna has been tested to operate in the frequency range of 1.8GHz to 18GHz which translates to a bandwidth of 16.2GHz,” Pal said, pointing out the fact that the usage of bandwidth is determined by the Federal Communication Commission International (FCCI), New York. “It is up to the FCCI to decide the application of this range of bandwidth.”
“The design of the UWB antenna is simple and cheap. The material used is fiber-reinforced plastics which is less expensive and the fabrication process is a simple wet chemical etching method,” Pal said, adding that it has a wide range of applications from high-speed wireless data transfer to watching a movie or using it in medicine for transmission of high-resolution video of a surgical process.
Srikanta Pal’s goal was to decrease the size and to have conformability in such a way that the antenna can be configured in a planar Printed Circuit Board (PCB) form and can be pasted on any surface for ease of mounting.
