Compact Antennas for Sensor Systems

In the framework of the European School of Antennas and Propagation, we are pleased to inform you that the course "Compact Antennas for Sensor Systems" will take place in an in-person format from UPC, Barcelona, from May 26th to 30th, 2025. It is organized by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). The course is intended for P.h.D students, engineers, and postdocs with a background in Electromagnetic.

Wireless small antenna systems for pervasive sensing are becoming a critical part of the growing world of the IoT for applications ranging from smart cities, urban mobility, and new industry to medical care. The course will cover the modeling and design principles of compact antennas to the fabrication technologies for communications and sensing applications. It includes the theoretical background, design principles, implementation aspects, and measurement methods. As a special case, the principles of fractal geometries and their application to the design of miniaturized and self-complementary antennas and devices will be presented. Specific properties and constraints for the multi-element and reconfigurable antennas will be addressed. Small antenna measurement techniques will be reviewed, and the particular problems linked to electrically small antenna measurement will be discussed. Finally, a presentation from Ignion (a worldwide leading compact antenna design company) will address some of the state-of-the-art industrial products and requirements. 

The participants will design antennas, with different analytical and software tools and assess their directivity, efficiency, and diversity performance with both experimental and computational methods. For the design of the embedded sensors, the basics of wireless propagation in dispersive and lossy media will be covered, and practical parameters will be discussed. Some prototypes will be designed, implemented, and measured.