A twelve element dual-band MIMO antenna for 5G smartphones

In this paper, a 12x12 dual-band MIMO antenna for 5G smartphones is proposed. It operates in the sub 6 GHz (2.4GHz and 3.5GHz) frequency bands. The MIMO antenna elements are printed on an FR4 epoxy substrate that has a thickness of 0.8mm. The main substrate measures 150 x 75 x 0.8 mm3, while the side substrates have dimensions of 75 x 6 x 0.8mm3. The twelve dual-band antenna elements are compact in size. Each antenna element size is reduced significantly, which is 11.20 x 5.98 mm2(0.0896 lambda x 0.04784 lambda). These antenna elments are arranged in such a way that the MIMO antenna not only provides polarization diversity but also helps in achieving good performance in terms of isolation, which is more than 13.5 dB between two adjacent antenna elements. Another significance of the proposed antenna is that both the frequency bands can be tuned independently by varying the corresponding length of each arm. The performance parameters like efficiency is around 40-56% for the lower band and it is 48-62% for the upper band. The envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) is below 0.04 in both frequency bands for the proposed dual band MIMO antenna.