This paper proposes a high-order MIMO antenna operating at 3.5 GHz for a 5G new radio. Using an eighth-mode substrate integrated waveguide (EMSIW) cavity and considering a typical smartphone scenario, a two-element MIMO antenna is developed and extended to a twelve-element MIMO. These MIMO elements are closely spaced, and by employing multiple diversity techniques, high isolation is achieved without using a decoupling network. The asymmetric EMSIW structures resulted in radiation pattern diversity, and their orthogonal placement provides polarization diversity. The radiation characteristics and diversity performance are parametrically optimized for a two-element MIMO antenna. The experimental results exhibited 6.0 dB and 10.0 dB bandwidths of 250 and 100 MHz, respectively. The measured and simulated radiation patterns are closely matched with a peak gain of 3.4 dBi and isolation ≥36 dB. Encouraged with these results, higher-order MIMO, namely, four- and twelve-element MIMO are investigated, and isolation ≥35 and ≥22 dB are achieved, respectively. The channel capacity is found equal to 56.37 bps/Hz for twelve-element MIMO, which is nearly 6.25 times higher than the two-element counterpart. The hand and head proximity analysis reveal that the proposed antenna performances are within the acceptable limit. A detailed comparison with the previous works demonstrates that the proposed antenna offers a simple, low-cost, and compact MIMO antenna design solution with a high diversity performance.
Keywords: 5G smartphone; eighth-mode substrate integrated waveguide (EMSIW); multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna; specific absorption rate (SAR); sub-6 GHz band.