This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LAWP.2016.2548018, IEEE
Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
Multiband Full Metal Rimmed Antenna Design
for Smartphones
Rao Shahid Aziz, Ashwini K. Arya, and Seong-Ook, Park, Senior member, IEEE
 service life of the smartphone, also it increase the aesthetic
Abstract— In this paper, a multiband full metal rimmed
antenna covering ten frequency bands for personal wireless
communication terminals is presented. The design antenna is
based on simple and effective techniques that are used for metal
rimmed smartphone applications. The proposed antenna with
full metal rim is designed on RO4350B substrate within the
volume of 130 x 70 x 5 mm3. We employed RO4350B substrate
with inserted vias as metal rim with height of 5 mm, which
surrounds inner circuit board. The circuit board substrate has a
ground plane, which is connected to the metal rim via extended
substrate patch. This connection divides the rim into two metal
rim strips. The combination of these two strips allow the design to
operate on ten bands. By performing perturbation on ground
plane further add more operating bands and make the design
excellent candidate for multiband operation. The designed
antenna can be used to serve on GSM850/900, GPS, DCS, PCS,
UMTS, WiBro at 2.35GHz, Bluetooth, ISM, SDM-B at 2.65GHz,
WiMAX at 3.5GHz, and C-band at 4GHz wireless communication
bands. A prototype antenna was fabricated and tested for input
reflection coefficient, radiation performances, antenna gain and
efficiency. The measured and simulated results have been
presented and discussed.
Index Terms—Full metal rim, multiband antennas.
I. INTRODUCTION
M ultiband antennas for the current personal wireless
communications that facilitate various global
communication standards and services becomes imperative.
The antennas for modern communication devices should be
capable of operating at maximum possible frequency bands to
serve multiple cellular and non-cellular communication
applications. Moreover, the antennas for portable handheld
wireless communication terminals should have compact,
low-profile, robust, light weight, easy to manufacture, and
flexible structures [1].
Besides these qualities, recent years mobile phone handsets
have entered into a rapid development as it becomes thinner
and smarter, especially smartphones. The other obvious
increasing demand that a smartphone has a metal ring. The
metal rim provides sufficient mechanical strength to extend the
Manuscript received July xx, 2015. This work was supported by the
National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea
government (MSIP) (No. NRF-2013R1A2A1A01014518).
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305-732,
Korea (e-mail: rshahid@kaist.ac.kr; akarya@kaist.ac.kr;
sopark@ee.kaist.ac.kr).
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look. Several possible solutions for mobile handset antennas
integrated with metal components were recently reported
[2]-[10]. It has been observed that when a metal component
such as metal rim is placed close to the antenna periphery, some
undesired coupling effects can occur; which cause degradation
on the impedance matching and bandwidth of the antenna.
Recently, there are significant efforts going on and several
promising solutions have been reported [2]-[4], which can
resolve the effects of metal rim. For example in [2] authors
proposed a dual-loop antenna with unbroken copper metal rim.
This proposed dual-loop antenna is capable of covering seven
operating bands. It is a very simple and efficient design but the
unbroken metal rim is flexible. It is difficult to fix the metal rim
made up of copper around the system ground plane. In [3], it
has presented a slot antenna by adding several grounded
patches between the ground plane and unbroken metal rim. The
two slots are fed by the same feeding strip, which can cover five
WWAN bands. In [4], it has shown a method to reduce the
effects of the metal rim by inserting three gaps and two
grounded patches. This method can alleviate the effects of the
metal rim. Seen from the above discussion, both of them
occupy too much space of the PCB and the width of the narrow
edges of these two antennas is always more than 15 mm, which
are not suitable for narrow-frame antenna designs [5], [6].
Considering these problems we propose a multiband antenna
for today’s mobile handsets that can serve more than ten
frequency bands. The proposed multiband antenna is
surrounded by a full metal rim made up of RO4350B substrate
with inter connecting vias. This substrate made metal rim fixed
and maintain a gap between circuit board. The metal rim is fed
by a 50Ω coaxial cable. The circuit board with ground plane has
an extended patch which connect it to the surrounded full metal
rim. This connection divides the rim into two metal rim strips.
The combination of these two metal rim strips allow the design
to operate on ten operating bands. Next, the perturbation was
performed in the main circuit board system ground plane. This
perturbation adds operating bands and make this design more
efficient to operate on other multiple operating frequencies.
Therefore, multiband performances have been achieved by
using a fixed metal rim and perturbed ground plane on the
circuit board. The proposed antenna has been designed within a
volume of 130 x 70 x 5 mm3 which is comparable to that of
unbroken metal rim antennas reported in the literature. A
prototype of the designed antennas was fabricated and
evaluated for the input reflection coefficient and radiation
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LAWP.2016.2548018, IEEE
Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters

performances. The measurement and simulation results have Different effects on impedance matching and bandwidth can be
been presented and discussed in the paper. observed at the lower and upper bands when the height H is
varied from 5 to 9 mm. Therefore, H = 5mm is the suitable
II. ANTENNA DESIGN METHODOLOGY height for the proposed antenna design.
Top no ground

Fig. 1 depicts geometry of the proposed designed antenna. portion

(70 x 20 mm2) Extension to support the Metal Rim (1.254 x 2 mm2)
H = 5 mm
O P
As can be seen in Fig. 1(a), it consists of the following two Circuit Board
behind the ground Wt = 20 mm
plane with
major parts: a circuit board with ground plane and a fixed full RO4350B
substrate (εr=3.66,
tanδ=0.00037,
metal rim surrounded by the circuit board. Side and back views 0.254 mm
Thickness).
Gap = 2 mm

of the antenna with detailed physical dimensions are shown in Y Ground Patch
134 mm

X N 4 mm
Fig. 1(b) and (c), respectively. The proposed antenna occupies RO4350B Substrate
Metal Rim with
Interconnecting Vias
Z
RO4350B Substrate Metal
Rim with Interconnecting

a volume of 130 x 70 x 5 mm3. As illustrated in Fig. 1(a), a L1 = 50 mm 50 Ω coaxial

feed line
K
L2 = 25 mm
Vias

Bottom no ground
0.254-mm thick RO4350B substrate of relative permittivity portion
(70 x 5 mm2) Main system
ground plane
L
3.66 and loss tangent 0.0037 is used for the circuit board. The (70 x 115 mm2) M
Wb = 5 mm
H = 5 mm

circuit board of 130 x 70 mm2 is embraced by a full metal rim (a) (b) (c)
Fig. 1. Proposed antenna configurations (a) Perspective view, (b) back view, (c)
whose height is of 5 mm. In order to maintain the physical side view.
stability of the metal rim RO4350B substrate has been utilized
with thickness of 0.254 mm. Conducting vias have been 0

employed for interconnection of the top and bottom layers of

-5
the metal rim. The distance between the circuit board and the
metal rim is 2 mm similar to [2], [3]. It can be seen that the -10

S-Parameter (dB)
system circuit board has four more extensions of 2 mm from
each sides so as to tightly fix the circuit board inside the metal -15

rim. The 5 x 70 mm2 and 20 x 70 mm2 non-ground portion is set -20

Strip loop#1
Strip loop#2
Combination of
at the bottom and top edges of the circuit board, respectively. Strip loop#1 and
Strip loop#2
The antenna is excited by a 50Ω coaxial feed line. The distance -25

between the feeding point and the bottom edge of the circuit
board is 25 mm as depicted in Fig. 1(b). The system circuit
board with ground plane has an extended patch which helps to
connect it to the surrounded unbroken metal rim. The distance
between the grounded patch and the bottom edge of the circuit
board is 50 mm as depicted in Fig. 1(c) [2]. A copper sheet of
0.035 mm thickness is used in fabrication of the prototype
antenna. The ground plane size chosen for this antenna is
reasonable for modern multistandard mobile phones.
The full metal strip can be divided into two strip loops i.e.,
KPON and KLMN as shown in Fig. 2. The length of the strip
loop#1 (KPON) is about 260 mm and it generate a λ/2 at 0.67
GHz. Higher-order mode of strip loop#1 such as λ, 3λ/2, 2λ,
and 5λ/2 are also excited. The length of the strip loop#2
(KLMN) is about 156 mm (about λ/2 at 1.13 GHz) which can
provide two high-order resonant modes (λ and 3λ/2 modes).
The two fundamental modes of strip loops generate a wide
bandwidth to cover GSM850/900 band. However, higher order
modes of these strip loops combination provide upper bands
(GPS, DCS, PCS, UMTS, WiBro at 2.35GHz, Bluetooth, ISM,
SDM-B at 2.65GHz, WiMAX at 3.5GHz, and C-band at
4GHz).
III. ANTENNA DESIGN OPTIMIZATION PROCESS
The height of metal rim and two non-ground portions, plays
vital role in the impedance matching of the antenna design. The
optimization of these parameters enhance the performance of
proposed design. The typical thickness of smartphones are in
the range of 6.2-10.7 mm [7]. In this design the height is 5 mm
which can suit smartphones. However, simulated results in Fig.
3(a) of the proposed antenna with different heights are shown.
-30
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
Frequency (GHz)
Fig. 2. Simulated S-Parameters of strip#1 (KPON), strip#2 (KLMN) and their
combinations (KLMNOP).
Fig. 3(b) shows the parametric study of top non-ground
portion of the circuit board. Varying the width Wt from 15 to 25
mm of the top no ground portion effects the impedance
matching and bandwidth over the lower band. It is noticed form
the simulated S-Parameter plot that at Wt = 20mm improved
impedance matching and bandwidth is obtained over the lower
band. Similarly, Fig. 3(c) shows the parametric study of bottom
no ground portion of the circuit board. The width W b is varied
from 0 to 10 mm of the bottom no ground portion. It affects the
impedance matching and bandwidth over the lower and upper
bands. It is observed that at Wb = 5mm enhance impedance
matching and desired resonance in lower and upper bands are
obtained.
To make the designed antenna desirable for other operating
bands perturbation on the ground plane has been performed.
Due to this perturbation the antenna with metal rim covers the
middle bands and adds more upper bands. The schematic of the
designed antenna with perturbation and its optimized
parametric study is reported in Fig. 4. It is evident from the
plots that when the ground plane parameter S and R are
optimized to 6mm and 43mm, respectively, the proposed
antenna design is seen to cover 3:1 VSWR in ten operating
bands from 0.75-4.33 GHz. However, nowadays, in practice it
is recommended that the clearance is as small as possible in
order to place a bigger screen. Therefore, to overcome this
problem in proposed design, a super-substrate with a copper
layer can be attached to accommodate a bigger touch screen.

1536-1225 (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LAWP.2016.2548018, IEEE
Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
TABLE I
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN REPORTED DESIGN [2] AND PROPOSED DESIGN
Total Top Top no Bottom Operating Antenna Total
Dimension no-ground -ground side no-ground Frequency Gain Antenna
Design Substrate RIM
portion portion portion Range Efficiency
(mm3) (mm2) (mm2) (mm2) (GHz) (dBi) (%)
Copper
FR4
Reference (unstable, 0.82-0.96 1.0-3.9 60-80
130 x 70 x 5 εr=4.4, 70 x 10 0 70 x 5
[2] flexible, 1.71-2.69
δloss=0.024
fragile)
RO4350B RO4350B 0.64-4.33
Proposed 130 x 70 x 5 εr=3.66, (stable, 70 x 20 43 x 6 70 x 5 (covers 0.9-4.9 65-91
δloss=0.0037 fixed) more bands)

-10
-5

S-Parameter (dB)
-10
S-Parameter (dB)

-20

-15

-20 -30
H = 5 mm (Proposed) R = 38 mm
H = 7 mm R = 43 mm (Proposed)
-25 H = 9 mm R = 48 mm
-40
-30 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
Frequency (GHz)
Frequency (GHz)
(b)
(a)
Fig. 4. (a) Schematic of the designed antenna with perturbed ground plane and
0
simulated S-Parameters for S (b) simulated S-Parameters for R (Other
dimensions are the same as given in Fig. 1).
-5

IV. MEASUREMENT RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

S-Parameter (dB)

-10
A prototype antenna was fabricated to verify the simulation
-15 results. The prototype has been characterized by measuring
input reflection coefficient and the radiation patterns. The
-20 Wt = 15 mm
Wt = 20 mm (Proposed)
Wt = 25 mm
comparison of the measured and simulated reflection
-25
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
coefficients for the optimized designed antenna is shown in Fig.
Frequency (GHz) 5 along with the prototype of the proposed antenna. Both the
(b) simulated and measured reflection coefficients are in good
0
agreement. It can be seen from the measured result that the
designed antennas covers 3:1 VSWR bands from 0.64-4.33
-5
GHz. Therefore, the designed multiband antenna operates on
ten standard operating frequencies.
S-Parameter (dB)

-10

The radiation characteristics of the proposed antenna are also

-15
measured and studied. Fig. 6 plots the simulated and measured
Wb = 0 mm
-20 Wb = 5 mm (Proposed)
Wb = 10 mm
radiation patterns at 0.9 GHz, 2.1 GHz and 3.5 GHz,
respectively. At 0.9 GHz in xy-plane dipole like radiation
-25
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
patterns is observed, which can provide good coverage for
Frequency (GHz)

(c) GSM850/900 operating bands. The other resonant frequencies

Fig. 3. Simulated S-Parameters for (a) height, H of the metal rim, (b) top no at 2.1 and 3.5 GHz are also plotted in Fig. 6. The simulated and
ground portion width Wt, (c) bottom no ground portion width Wb. measured antenna gain and radiation efficiencies are shown in
Fig. 7, respectively. The gains are about 0.9-4.9 dBi in the
0
operating bands. At lower band the gain range varies from 0.9
-5
to 1.5 dBi, and the radiation efficiency is about 65%-91%
which are acceptable for the GSM900 practical applications.
-10
For other bands GPS /DCS /PCS /UMTS /WiBro /Bluethooth
S-Parameters (dB)

-15 /ISM /S-DMB /C-band the obtained gain is 1.9-4.9 dBi, and the
Perturbation
corresponding radiation efficiency is larger than 65%.
-20 in ground
plane
Therefore, the measured radiation characteristics of the
-25
R = 43
designed multiband antenna within the operating band are
S = 2 mm
S = 6 mm mm
suitable for meeting the requirement for smartphone systems.
-30
S = 4 mm
S = 6 mm (Proposed)
Table I shows the performance comparison to the recent
-35 reported work [2]. The proposed antenna covers more operating
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5
bands and has more stable and fixed metal rim, better gain and
Frequency (GHz)
(a)
efficiency compare to the reported study.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LAWP.2016.2548018, IEEE
Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters

multiband antenna has been successfully designed, fabricated,

0 and measured. It has a simple planar structure with a metal rim
3:1 VSWR of height 5 mm. This design provides a solution for unbroken
-10
metal rim smartphones. The obtained measured results
4.33 GHz including S-parameters, radiation patterns, antenna gain and
radiation efficiency are presented, which can meet the
S-Parameter (dB)

0.64
-20 GHz
requirements for mobile systems.
-30
Measured 1.0
Simulated 14
-40
0.8
12

Antenna Efficiency (x 100) %

Antenna Gain (dBi)

-50 10
0.6
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 Efficiency
Frequency (GHz) 8
Simulated Antenna Efficiency
Fig. 5. Measured and simulated S-Parameters for the proposed designed 0.4 Measured Antenna Efficiency
Simulated Antenna Gain
antenna. Measured Antenna Gain 6

0.2 Gain
4
90
10 90 90
135 0 45 10
135 0 45 10
45 0.0 2
-10 135 0
-20 -10 -10
-20
-30 -20
-30
180 -40 0 180 -40 0
-30
0
180 -40 0
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5

315 315
Frequency (GHz)
225 225 315
225
Fig. 7. Measured and simulated antenna gain and radiation efficiency across the
270 270 270
operating bands for the proposed antenna.
XY-plane
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