Unveiling the potential of antenna tuners

The evolution of modern mobile terminals has been driven by the user interface and broadband connectivity. While rapidly rising peak data rates have been achieved, real world baseline performance has fallen substantially over the years. The key factor driving this degradation has been reduced antenna volume driven by the race for thinner and display-dominated platforms. To maintain acceptable efficiency, tunable and reconfigurable antennas are being deployed to enable effective use of reduced instantaneous bandwidths. This capability brings new challenges as well as new opportunities to the handset designer. A high performance solution addressing these challenges and supporting carrier aggregation is presented.