Current trends and future perspective of designing on-chip antennas

With the evolution of 5G and 6G network architectures, the demand for highly compact system-on-chip-based devices with high data transfer capabilities has been increased significantly. While the advancement of very large-scale integration technology with the continuous scaling of complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor nodes put forward to integrate different functional modules of a complete system on a single IC board, the antenna being the largest component still remains outside of the chip. Integration of the antenna and other functional modules of a system on the same chip leads to produce a really compact and economical design. Though on-chip antenna (OCAs) have several other advantages and emerging applications, they have some design challenges in terms of low gain due to losses in the substrate, requirement of miniaturization at lower microwave frequencies (LMFs) (particularly, below 10 GHz), unavailability of proper design rules, etc. In this paper, analyzing the design challenges of OCAs, their current research trends and future perspective applications are discussed.