New nature-inspired antenna improves wireless performance by 6-8x, coming to routers and smartphones soon

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 11, 2014 at 12:23 pm
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  • • A Dutch company, which goes by the rather uninspiring name of Antenna Company, says it has discovered a new way of building radio antennas that have six to eight times the performance of the existing antennas in your smartphone or wireless router. Such a performance boost could result in much longer range, lower power operation, better use of available bandwidth, and increased speeds. The key to these new antennas, oddly enough, is the superformula — a fairly new mathematical concept that appears to describe many complex shapes found in nature. By building antennas based on this formula (which results in some rather organic looking shapes, incidentally), efficiency can be massively increased, improving transmission and reception quality.
      

      Some of the natural shapes that the superformula describes
      Antenna Company, which doesn’t appear to be shipping any commercial products just yet (but it sounds like it’s close), is promising to bring two interesting bits of technology to the antenna world. First, there’s the aforementioned superformula — a formula created by Johan Gielis, a horticultural and biosciences engineer who sought to describe some of the more complex shapes that emerge in nature. The second piece of the puzzle is a differentkind of antenna — a dielectric resonator antenna. (Read: Duke’s metamaterial superlens could finally allow for long-range wireless charging.)
      Almost every radio antenna in commercial use is made of metal. The wireless and cellular antennas in your smartphone are made of metal. The antennas on the back of your router are made of metal (but covered in protective plastic). Your TV and radio antenna are made of metal. At lower frequencies, metal is just fine — but at microwave and higher frequencies they become lossy, dissipating energy into the atmosphere and degrading the signal strength/quality. This is a problem, because almost all cellular and WiFi communications use microwave frequencies. A dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is fashioned out of a dielectric (ceramic or plastic in this case) rather than metal, reducing the amount of signal loss. The military already use DRAs for high-frequency radar applications, but for some reason they have never come to the consumer market (probably due to fabrication complexity, cost, brittleness, etc.)
      

      Antenna shapes, as described by the superformula
      Now, though, Antenna Company wants to bring superformula-inspired DRAs to the consumer market. As you can see in the image above, these superformula antennas come in a variety of odd, organic-looking shapes. Depending on the application, you would opt for an antenna shape that produces the desired signal spread. The performance gain is on the order of 2-4x for a single antenna (3-6dB), and 6-8x for multiple antennas (MIMO). There is also the possibility to reduce the number of antennas used, due to improved signal strength, better beam forming, and so on. (Read: Infinite-capacity wireless vortex beams carry 2.5 terabits per second.)
      It seems the current designs have been successfully tested at the 2.4 and 5GHz frequency bands, which covers WiFi, Bluetooth, and some other wireless technologies, but not cellular (which generally sits between 700MHz and 2.1GHz). According to Myce, Samsung, LG, and HTC are the kind of customers that Antenna Company would like to pick up — and apparently, the company is already in an “advanced stage of negotiations” with some of these companies. These new antennas could really change the wireless landscape — but for now, until we actually see one of these superformula-inspired DRAs, we probably shouldn’t get too excited. Antenna Company has a pretty impressive company roster, though, and it’s backed by billionaire entrepreneur Marcel Boekhoorn. Maybe… just maybe… there’s something to these super antenna.