Antenna Requirements for Short Range High Speed Wireless Systems Operating at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies

Large amounts of worldwide unlicensed spectrum at 60 GHz may provide solutions for future short range very high speed wireless solutions. A number of challenges remain for this spectrum to be a viable solution for high volume consumer applications. In this paper, we look closely at requirements for antennas in indoor scattering environments with a focus on signal to noise ratio for fading multi-path channels. These requirements are compared with realistic received signal to noise ratios that can be expected with Si based RF front ends. This analysis shows that high gain adaptive antennas will be required to achieve acceptable performance. Though antennas do scale with frequency we show that they are still too large for easy integration into consumer electronics