With the introduction of the fourth generation (4G) of cellular mobile communications, there has been an increase in the frequency bands that a generic mobile phone should be able to operate. This requirement poses some challenges in the design of the transceiver modules of the device as well as the RF front-end and the antenna. From the antenna design point of view, the newly added frequency bands especially LTE bands 12-13-17 which goes down to 700MHz creates the main design challenge: covering 700-960MHz (30% bandwidth) in the low-band, considering also backward compatibility with the former technologies like GSM850/900. Since the space reserved for the antenna is electrically small in this frequency range, special design techniques are necessary to obtain the required bandwidth for a generic mobile terminal antenna. It should also be taken into account in the design phase, that the antenna needs to be appropriate for operation in the data-rate enhancement techniques like MIMO (multiple input multiple output) and carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced. Furthermore, considering the real use cases of the mobile terminal, the effect of the user (hand, head and both) on the antenna performance should also be investigated. In this thesis, several antenna designs for 4G coverage in mobile terminals are proposed. Different antenna topologies are evaluated consisting of tunable/passive antennas as well as single/multi-feed structures.
