PCB Antenna Design and Optimization

Design PCB antennas with arbitrary planar geometry using Antenna Toolbox™ and the PCB Antenna Designer app. The resulting PCB antennas can consist of multilayer patches and slots created with any arbitrary metal layer. Draw arbitrary shapes with a graphical point-and-click approach and specify variables to parametrize the design and automate the PCB design space exploration. Create arbitrary metal layers by applying Boolean operations in a chosen order and connect them using vertical interconnects (vias). Use MATLAB^® to programmatically describe your own recipe for the design of a PCB antenna and fabricate it through Gerber file generation.

Verify that the described PCB geometry is feasible and proceed with electromagnetic analysis to determine far and near field radiation, current distribution, and port properties such as impedance and S-parameters. Antenna Toolbox uses the Method of Moments to compute the antenna performance and allows you to customize the mesh density in metal and dielectric layers to trade off accuracy and speed.

Optimize the antenna performance using state-of-the-art surrogate methods. You start by parametrizing the geometry of the PCB antenna by defining variables that are linked directly or indirectly to the geometry. First, you choose which variables you want to tune, and for those, you define the bounds. Then you select the objective function, such as gain or bandwidth, and add a constraint to the optimization problem. The SADEA algorithm will use AI to create a surrogate model and optimize your antenna.

Highlights:

• Design PCB antennas with arbitrary geometry
• Use variables to programmatically define the PCB geometry and metal layers
• Analyze the antenna performance using the Method of Moments
• Customize and validate the mesh of the PCB structure to trade off accuracy and speed
• Optimize the antenna performance using surrogate methods