A Brief History of Basic Antennas

文摘 2024-06-01 11:40 新加坡

Slide 1

Under the suggestion of Prof Chi Hou Chan, the General Chair of GSMM2024, the Special Session dedicated to Prof Kwai Man Luk for his four decades of antenna research and innovations was planned by Prof Hang Wong, the Technical Program Chair of GSMM2024. The Special Session chaired by Prof Kwok Wa Leung was held in the afternoon on 20 May 2024 at City University of Hong Kong. This slide shows the information of the Special Session.

At the end of the Special Session, during the coffee break, and at the welcome reception, many attendees requested for the slides of my talk. Hence, I created the handouts and decided to upload them to the public account of the Antennas Academy for your reference.

Slide 2

Yueping Zhang, PhD, is a Professor with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Zhang was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (2018-2020). He received the 2012 Sergei A. Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award and the 2020 John Kraus Antenna Award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. He also received the 2022 Exceptional Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society. He is among a few in the world who have had three major awards from two IEEE societies. His current interests are in the development of antenna-on-chip (AoC) technology with novel microbump antennas for very large-scale antenna integration and characterization of chip-scale propagation channels at terahertz for wireless chip area network (WCAN).

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Let me show you a timeline of some basic antennas from 1887 to 2006. My talk is limited to them.

Slide 5

Hertz lived a short but fruitful life.

Hertz is the inventor of the first antennas: dipole and loop antennas.

Hertz is also the founder of antenna theory.

However, Hertz is not the first to use the term of antenna in the world. He used the terms of conductor and circuit to describe the antennas in his work.

It is said that Hertz admired Faraday much more than Maxwell. He highly made regard of Faraday for his intuition and insight to the physical nature.

Hertz did not introduce the grounding concept to his antennas. Hence, the dipole and loop antennas are the earliest differential antennas.

Slide 6

Marconi invented the monopole antenna, a basic antenna, that has been widely used since its invention.

Marconiintroduced the grounding concept (ground plane) to his antennas. Hence, the monopole antenna is the earliest single-ended antenna.

Marconi is probably the first to use the term of antenna.

Let me bring your attention to the 1933 picture. It shows that Marconi grabbed a pole. The pole models the monopole antenna invented by Marconi in 1895. The pole is a part of the monument that Marconi shoveled the soil with his own hands, laid the foundation and erected it when he visited Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China on 8 December 1933.

Probably, I am the first to talk about the story behind this picture in an international conference.

Slide 7

Yagi 's paper is the only antenna paper that was reprinted in the IEEE flagship Journal in 1984 and 1997, respectively. Yagi’s paper is a classical and seminal paper but not a highly-cited paper by today’s standard. The Doodle Yagi’s 130th Birthday launched on Jan 28, 2016, was a rare honor to an antenna scholar.

Uda played an important role in the invention of Yagi-Uda antenna. Uda published the earliest study of the Yagi-Uda antenna in 1925 in Japan in Japanese. Uda published the study of the Yagi-Uda antenna in USA in 1927 in the Proc. IRE. (S. Uda, “High angle radiation of short electric waves,” Proc. IRE, vol. 15, May 1927). Yagi also published the study of the Yagi-Uda antenna in USA in 1928 in the same journal Proc. IRE. Uda’s papers in Japanese and English received little attention inside and outside of Japan. Yagi’s paper was credited with bringing the concept of the Yagi-Uda antenna to a worldwide audience.

On his deathbed, Uda wished to have the Yagi-Uda antenna erected in his grave. However, even though it was said that he would leave his invention as a monument as a blessing to an engineer, it would be too strange to erect an antenna in the grave, and after consulting with the people concerned about the remains of the Uda family's grave, the Uda family's tomb was Instead, the design of the Yagi-Uda antenna was engraved on the epitaph.

Slide 8

The slot antenna was invented by the talented British engineer Alan Blumlein in 1938.

I would give the slot antenna the same place in the history of antennas as the dipole antenna. The slot antenna directly gave birth to the three major principles of antenna design proposed later (electromagnetic Babinet principle, self-complementarity principle, and self-similarity principle).

Blumlein covered a wide range of fields, including antennas, circuits, electroacoustics, television, radar, etc. He was especially famous for his invention of stereo in 1931. 74 years after his death (2015), he received an IEEE Milestone, and 76 years after his death (2017), he also received a Technical Grammy Award (accepted by his son).

As a young man, Blumlein was admitted to Imperial College London and graduated with a first-class honors degree after two years of study. He wrote two papers while he was a student, one of which won the IEE Best Paper Award.

I think that Blumlein was equivalent to H. A. Wheeler in USA in the history of radio electronics. Antenna was a small fraction of work.

Slide 9

The helical antenna has been well covered in the book “Antennas” by the inventor Prof John Kraus.

Slide 10

John Dyson did his Ph.D. research under Professor Victor Rumsey on the frequency independent antennas at UIUC. John Dyson was the inventor of two frequency independent antennas, the equiangular spiral antenna and conical log spiral antenna. The conical log spiral antenna was used as an array element to build Vermilion River Radio Telescope. The array was designed by Professor Y. T. Lo.

Slide 11

Prof R. W. P. King was the inventor of the inverted F antenna.

At age of 100, he still published a single-authored paper. He was a real scholar and really achieved “Live till old age, learn till old age, teach till old age, write till old age = 活到老，学到老，教到老，写到老 ”.

The picture shows that he held something in the air. It was a dipole made of gold. It was presented to him as a souvenir by his PhD students at his retirement ceremony.

Slide 12

The outstanding American engineer Robert Munson made microstrip antennas practical solutions to many antenna system problems, thereby gave birth to a new antenna industry. The microstrip antennas shown in the photo operated at 1.727 GHz. The microstrip antenna has been the most popular antenna since 1970s.

Slide 13

Peter J. Gibson presented the Vivaldi antenna at the 9^th European Microwave Conference, Brighton, UK, 17-20 September 1979. Gibson never said why he named his innovative antenna the "Vivaldi" aerial in the paper. If you ask an antenna engineer where the name came from, chances are he'll tell you Vivaldi was the inventor. Not so!

Peter J. Gibson is listed in the Microwave Hall of Fame (https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/microwave-hall-of-fame-part-iii).

Slide 14

Hiroshi Haruki was the inventor of the planar inverted F antenna (PIFA).

Many communications people have considered Tokia Taga as the inventor of the PIFA, due to his influential paper published in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications in 1987, which is wrong.

We, antenna people, if also consider like that, are wrong squared.

Slide 15

Professor K. W. Leung, the Chair of this Special Session and the former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TAP has contributed most significantly to our understanding of the DRA invented by Stuart A. Long.

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Slide 17

Many antenna people may ask why such an original work was not published in the IEEE TAP. I got the answer from Prof Luk on 5 May 2024. I quote his answer “It happened that I got an invitation to submit my paper to the first issue of this new journal. Of course, the most important reason was that I wanted to make sure this new idea be published. As you know , very new ideas may not be easily accepted by reviewers.”

The use of ME instead of EM came from the suggestion of the late Prof K. K. Mei.

Slide 18

Since 2006, there had been 742 papers on ME dipole antennas published as of 17 March 2024. Most of these papers report simulated and measured results of ME dipole antennas for various potential applications. Few papers on the theory of the ME dipole antennas have been published. Actually, understanding of the principle of operation of the ME dipole antennas remains the same as that explained by Prof Luk and Dr Wong in 2006. Obviously, an in-depth theoretical study of ME dipole is missing.

Characteristic mode analysis will provide new insight into the principle of operation of the ME dipole antennas.

Slide 19

This slide shows the simulated current distributions of the two operating characteristic modes, modes 2 and 5.

Slide 20

This slide shows that although there are two operating modes, mode 2 dominates and mode 5 replenishes, which can help us understand why the ME dipole antenna can operate over a broad bandwidth.

Slide 21

This slide shows that mode 2 radiates less in the ±y direction but mode 5 radiates more in the ±y direction. As a result, the ME dipole antenna tends to have an equal beamwidth in the E and H planes.

Slide 22

This slide shows that SJSemi has developed SmartAiP^TMtechnology that is suitable for mass production of ME dipole antennas for mmWave 5G applications.

Slide 23

This slide shows that ME dipole has been used as an element to realize mmWave phased array by Speed (A leading antenna company) and SJSemi (An advanced packaging company).

Slide 24

This slide shows the simulated and measured VSWR, gain, and isolation results of the AiP module, indicating that the frequency range from 24 to 43 GHz can be covered.

Slide 25

This slide shows the simulated and measured radiation patterns of the AiP module, indicating that the stable pattern has been achieved over the frequency range from 24 to 43 GHz.

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