Polarization-Reconfigurable Magnetoelectric Dipole Antenna for 5G Wi-Fi

A novel polarization-reconfigurable aperture-coupled magnetoelectric (ME) dipole antenna is presented. By electronically controlling the state of switches between square patches and an additional strip of the ME dipole, the antenna is capable of switching the polarization among one linearly polarized (LP) and two orthogonal circularly polarized states. A fully functional prototype is developed and tested, demonstrating the antenna with an overlapped bandwidth of 16% from 5.07 to 5.95 GHz for both S11 ≤ -10 dB and axial ratio (AR) ≤ 3 dB. A measured gain of approximately 8.2 dBi and a radiation efficiency of approximately 85% over the overlapped band are obtained for all polarization states. Moreover, due to advantages of the ME dipole, the proposed design is able to realize stable radiation patterns with both cross-polarization and back-radiation levels lower than -13 dB. With all these features, the proposed design is very attractive for 5G Wi-Fi applications.