Virginia Tech researchers are boasting of their latest creation, a compact ultra-wideband antenna that could have a host of applications in the home, for the military and in the automotive and medical industries. Such antennas are designed for high data throughput over short distances and with low energy use.
Taeyoung Yang, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student with the Wireless@Virginia Tech group, says he has pushed what’s theoretically possible in terms of antenna size and performance and has outlined a design for such an antenna. The antenna’s size is described like this on a Virginia Tech web site offering the technology for commercial application: The electrical size of the CUA is approximately 1/10 wavelength at the lower bound of the band, which is two times smaller than conventional ultra-wideband antennas.
Unmanned aircraft and collision detection are among advanced applications that the tech could someday be used for, he says.
“To our best knowledge, our invented antenna is the world’s smallest with more than a 10:1 bandwidth. It has more than 95 percent efficiency for signal transmission, and a fairly constant omni-directional radiation pattern,” said Yang in a statement.
