We celebrate a new edition of 'Research Fridays', a series of conferences that explores questions about university research and how this knowledge is transfered to society. On this occasion the speaker is Dr. Jaume Anguera, professor at La Salle Barcelona - Universitat Ramon Llull since 1999, where he teaches subjects related to antennas and electromagnetic propagation, and the title of the panel is 'Antenna Booster Technology: A Revolutionary Invention'.
For many decades, antenna and microwave engineering have been adjacent yet somewhat isolated disciplines. Both have been experiencing such a high degree of specialisation and sophistication that experts in one area would rarely dispute the expertise of someone in the adjacent one. At the same time, microwave engineers have primarily focused on taming the radio waves through all sorts of active (amplifiers, oscillators, active tuners, etc.) and passive (filters, couplers, splitters,…) devices, antenna engineers have been exploring new and creative ways to free the waves through increasingly complex antenna geometries. However, this divide may radically change with the introduction of antenna-boosters technology.
This technology makes antenna design much more similar to a filter design than conventional antenna engineering. Antenna-booster technology replaces a complex and usually customised antenna design with an off-the-shelf, standardised, miniature component called an antenna booster. Being surface-mount and chip-like, the antenna booster fits seamlessly in an electronic printed circuit board the same way any other electronic component (a microprocessor, a memory chip, an amplifier, filter or switch, to name a few) does. It can be assembled with a conventional pick-and-place machine, making the manufacture and design of the new generation of IoT/Mobile or wireless devices simpler, faster and more effective.
The presentation will give a general overview of antenna boosters’ fundamentals until recent applications of antenna boosters embedded in IoT devices.