An Investigation on Antenna Substrate Materials for the Design of 5X20 Massive MIMO Antennas

— The wireless technology resides at 5G global standard wireless communication. This standard enhances the network capacity, network coverage, lower latency and enormous bandwidth by increasing the operating frequencies of the communication standards. 5G standard promises to deliver a speed of 500 times faster than 4G by utilizing the technology such as massive MIMO, small cell, beam forming and full duplex technology. The higher operating frequencies leads to the path loss constrains and the device compact also one of the issues arises in the handheld wireless communication devices or massive machine type communications. To overcome these issues an effective antenna has to be designed for the new generation wireless standards. Most commonly used handheld communication devices, IoT devices and massive machine type communication uses microstrip patch antenna as radiating elements and the substrate materials associated with these antennas plays a key role for the development of an antenna. In this paper, investigations on six different substrate materials were done for the design of MIMO antenna. A rectangular microstrip antenna was designed under the operating frequency of 28 GHz using six different substrate materials such as Taconic TLY-5A, Arlon Diclad 880, Rogers Utralam, Rogers RO 3003, Rogers RO 3035 and Arlon AD 450. From this analysis an Arlon Diclad 880 substrate material is best suited for the developement of an array. An array of 10 elements and 100 elements microstrip patch antenna has been designed and simulated using CST microwave studio suite. A planar microstrip antenna array (2X5) was designed using Arlon Diclad 880 substrate material having the dielectric constant of 2.2 and a thickness of 0.127 mm, it gives a maximum gain of 13.74 dBi at 27.9 GHz, directivity of 14.29 dBi and the overall dimensions of 10×22.5×0.127 mm where as 5X20 massive MIMO antenna array gives a maximum gain of 23.66 dBi at 28.1 GHz, directivity of 24.15 dBi and the overall dimensions of 145×22.5×0.127 mm. Further slots will be introduced in the antenna for even more size reduction in the conventional microstrip patch antenna for the 5G wireless handheld communication devices and the IoT applications. Wireless Technology, Massive MIMO Antenna, 5X20 Antenna elements.