Smaller radio antennae for higher data transfer in the offing

Telecommunications engineer Prof Dr Mohammad Tariqul Islam of the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment (FKAB) at The National University of Malaysia (UKM) said to be versatile an antenna should be small enough to be used for ultra-wide band (UWB) and RFID devices.

Giving his public lecture here today Prof Tariqul Islam said RFID and UWB would need more compact antenna designs so that they can be fitted to mobile devices.

UWB is a very low energy level for short-range, high-bandwidth communications using a large portion of the radio spectrum, while RFID is a wireless use of electromagnetic fields to transfer data, for automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects.

He explained that smaller antennae for UWB band will be needed for high speed telecommunication networks, medical imaging, high density sensor networks and even radar systems.

Even now RFID antennae operating RFID frequencies are an essential part of technology that would be capable of realising the complete and seamless networking of computers in a work-place.

Among the antennae designs available, the ones with small size and flat shapes are the most attractive and are in great demand for various communication applications.

He, however, cautioned that performance of the flat or planar design is significantly affected by the size of the ground plane.

Some antennae are designed from metamaterials or artificial materials engineered to have properties that have not yet been found in nature so that they can be made to be so thin that they look like strips of foil for ease of integration into compact devices such as smart phones.

The recent discovery of metamaterials allows antennae to be designed with novel electromagnetic properties, such as permittivity and permeability.

The planar RFID antenna is suitable for handheld, fixed indoor and long range indoor/outdoor devices.

In the future, antennae with UWB will be part of high-speed telecommunications network, which would be able to achieve very high data transmissions including high-resolution three-dimensional images.

Prof Tariqul Islam found success in the field of research, winning several gold medals for Best Inventor for his research and innovation.

He currently oversees many research projects from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI), Ministry of Education and several research grants from Japan.

He did his PhD in Electrical, Electronics and Systems Engineering at UKM in 2006.