A Quad-Port Nature-Inspired Lotus-Shaped Wideband Terahertz Antenna for Wireless Applications

This article is aimed at designing an inventive compact-size quad-port antenna that can be operated within terahertz (THz) frequency spectra for a 6G high-speed wireless communication link. The single-element antenna comprises a lotus-petal-like radiating patch and a defected ground structure (DGS) on a 20 × 20 × 2 µm3 polyamide substrate and is designed to operate within the 8.96–13.5 THz frequency range. The THz antenna is deployed for a two-port MIMO configuration having a size of 46 × 20 × 2 µm3 with interelement separation of less than a quarter-wavelength of 0.18λ (λ at 9 THz). The two-port configuration operates in the 9–13.25 THz frequency range, with better than −25 dB isolation. Further, the two-port THz antenna is mirrored vertically with a separation of 0.5λ to form the four-port MIMO configuration. The proposed four-port THz antenna has dimensions of 46 × 46 × 2 µm3 and operates in the frequency range of 9–13 THz. Isolation improvement better than −25 dB is realized by incorporating parasitic elements onto the ground plane. Performance analysis of the proposed antenna in terms of MIMO diversity parameters, viz., envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) < 0.05, diversity gain (DG) ≈ 10, mean effective gain (MEG) < −3 dB, total active reflection coefficient (TARC) < −10 dB, channel capacity loss (CCL) < 0.3 bps/Hz, and multiplexing efficiency (ME) < 0 dB, is performed to justify the appropriateness of the proposed antenna for MIMO applications. The antenna has virtuous radiation properties with good gain, which is crucial for any wireless communication system, especially for the THz communication network.