A team comprising POSTECH Electrical Engineering PhD student Junho Park (advisor: Professor Wonbin Hong) and Mechanical Engineering PhD student Jaehyun Choi (co-advisor: Professor Wonbin Hong) has developed and completed validation of antenna tuning technology with SK Telecom to improve the communication quality of 5G mobile devices.
In conventional 4G LTE bands, antenna impedance changes caused by the external environment were compensated by placing a compensation circuit at the end of the antenna feed line and varying its electrical length to adjust impedance.
However, millimeter-wave 5G antenna systems integrate multiple antennas to implement beamforming. Their fundamentally different architecture from 4G LTE, the lack of ultrahigh-frequency components available for civilian use, and incompatibility with current 5G beamforming systems make conventional LTE compensation circuits unusable.
The POSTECH–SKT team therefore developed the world’s first broadly applicable 5G antenna impedance compensation technology for millimeter waves and completed validation in SKT’s actual 5G channel environment.
Applied to millimeter-wave 5G mobile communication systems, which require precise transmission and reception conditions, the technology is expected to improve voice and data quality and reduce battery power consumption.
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