The company’s new Antenna Band Switching Evaluation Board contains a small (45.5 by 60mm) evaluation board optimized for testing the antenna performance of standard-sized IoT devices.
The board has been engineered to reduce the number of device design iterations, improve accuracy, and hasten product time-to-market for low- and high-band frequency 4G, 5G, broadband LTE, LTE Cat-M, NB-IoT, and cellular LPWA applications.
These applications include cellular headsets and tablets, handheld electronics, IoT, home automation devices and smart grid devices.
“The new KYOCERA AVX Antenna Band Switching Evaluation Board is the first of its kind available in the global electronics market and will help RF design engineers optimize antenna size, performance, and emissions, reduce the number of device design iterations, more easily satisfy customer and regulatory specifications, and hasten product time-to-market,” said Carmen Redondo, Global Marketing Manager, Antennas, KYOCERA AVX.
Redondo went on: “It is also optimally sized for testing the performance of IoT devices, equipped with proven KYOCERA AVX components including a high-performance, universal broadband, FR4 LTE antenna with patented IMD technology and an Ether Switch & Tune chipset, and ideal for testing consumer electronics, industrial, medical, IoT, embedded systems, and utility market applications including cellular headsets and tablets, handheld electronics, embedded designs, telematics, tracking, and on-board diagnostics (OBD-II) systems, and industrial M2M, IoT, healthcare, home automation, and smart grid devices with operating frequencies extending from 968–960MHz and 1.71–2.17GHz.”
Active antennas capable of band switching, also known as aperture tuning, are increasingly used in electronics.
They have a number of advantages. For a start they cover a wider frequency range than passive antennas by actively switching between frequency bands.
Moreover, active antennas capable of covering the same frequencies as passive antennas have smaller form factors better suited to compact, high-density devices and, at equal size, will cover more frequency bands than passive antennas.
The active antennas used in the new evaluation board are equipped with patented Isolated Magnetic Dipole (IMD) technology, “which delivers unique size and performance advantages including reduced ground plane and keep-out area size requirements for greater design flexibility, superior RF field containment for reduced interaction with surrounding components, and higher efficiency, gain, isolation, and directivity characteristics than competing solutions for higher-reliability connectivity with better return loss and minimal interference,” it said in a press release from Kyocera AVX, which is a subsidiary of electronics giant Kyocera Corporation.
The new device was debuted at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.