Wideband Four-Port Compact Millimeter-Wave MIMO Antenna Configuration through Defected Ground Structure for Forthcoming 5G Handheld Devices

We presented a miniaturized defected ground structure-based millimeter-wave (MMW) contemporary MIMO antenna for 5G smart applications devices. The proposed MIMO antenna offers many advantages including high gain, compactness, planar geometry, wide impedance bandwidth, and reduced mutual coupling effects performance. The top layer of the proposed four-port MIMO antenna design comprises 1 × 2 rectangular patch array structures, with each placed at the middle of a 20 × 20 mm2 substrate of material (RO4350B) having thickness of 0.76 mm and loss tangent of 0.0037. For miniaturization and better performance, both the ground layer and radiating patches are defected with slots of a rectangular shape while an E-shaped slot is placed at the center of the ground plane. The operating impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna ranges from 26.4 to 30.9 GHz incorporating the dominant portion of the mm-wave band. The proposed MIMO antenna is also characterized by the fundamental MIMO performance metrics such as Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) which is less than 0.12 for any two-element array that encounters the mandatory standard of < 0.5, high Diversity gain (DG) reaching its ideal value of 10 as well as minimum isolation of −19 dB with a total efficiency of 85% at 28 GHz. These characteristics make the proposed compact four-port MIMO antenna one of the best candidates to be used in 5G portable devices. © 2021, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.