RF & ANTENNA DESIGN
Sigma Connectivity is an RF and antenna design house with an integrated in-house RF, antenna and EMC test lab. We design, simulate, tune and pre-comply wireless systems for connected and wearable devices, under one roof.
We have been doing this since 2013 and working with 5G since 2016. The engineers who simulate your antenna are the engineers who measure it and resolve what EMC pre-compliance finds. No handover, no second vendor, no lost context.
We cover the full RF and antenna design and verification cycle for connected and wearable devices, from first simulation to FCC and CE readiness.
Custom antenna design across 5G Sub-6 and mmWave, 4G LTE (Cat-M1, NB-IoT), Wi-Fi 6/6E, Bluetooth, UWB, GNSS, NFC, and ISM-band protocols including Zigbee. Handsets, IoT modules, industrial hardware, and wearables.
RF front-end engineering, including matching networks, filters, switches, amplifiers, and the full transmit/receive chain, optimised across all operating bands.
EM simulation using CST Studio Suite (3D full-wave, with mechanical and PCB assembly import on an in-house HPC cluster), Optenni Lab (matching circuit synthesis and switched antenna optimisation), Ansys SIwave (PCB and package power/signal integrity), and Keysight ADS (circuit co-simulation).
Over-the-air measurement in our MVG SG 24 anechoic chamber (400 MHz to 6 GHz, full 3D TRP/TIS, passive and active mode, MIMO/ECC, SPEAG phantoms) and CATR MA8172A (3GPP-compliant 5G NR OTA up to 39 GHz). Two Scattered Field Chambers cover 600 MHz to 8 GHz including throughput and propagation modelling.
EMC pre-compliance across seven dedicated chambers: Conducted Immunity, Radiated Immunity, Conducted Emission, Radiated Emission (FAR 3 and SAC5), Transient Surge and Burst, Magnetic Field Testing, and ESD. CE-marking and FCC readiness. Radiated Spurious Emission pre-compliance in our Rohde & Schwarz R-Line compact chamber.
DESIGN AND PRE-COMPLY UNDER ONE ROOF
No design house today owns the integrated story of antenna design through EMC pre-compliance. Most antenna vendors design. Most test labs test. Sigma Connectivity does both, with the same team.
That integration matters most at two points: early, when EMC awareness in simulation prevents issues from being baked into the PCB; and late, when pre-compliance finds a problem and the fix needs to come from the people who designed it. For US-market devices, we take a product from antenna concept through FCC-ready without the timeline cost of coordinating between organisations.
CASE STUDY: RF and antenna design for a mission-critical 5G device
A European device manufacturer required antenna and RF system performance meeting stringent reliability standards for a mission-critical 5G product intended for professional users.
Sigma Connectivity provided:
Sigma contributed to the full RF and antenna development of the HMD Secure Ivalo XE, a mission-critical 5G smartphone designed and developed in Europe. This included antenna design, RF system verification, and over-the-air performance validation across the required 5G frequency bands. The device demanded performance levels typical of high-end handsets within a rugged, reliability-focused form factor.
CASE STUDY: Qualcomm 5G IoT reference design
A product team building on the Qualcomm QCM6490 platform required antenna and RF front-end design with deep chipset-level integration.
Sigma Connectivity provided:
Drawing on a 10-year working relationship with Qualcomm and direct access to the QCM6490 development licence, Sigma Connectivity's team provided antenna design and RF front-end engineering with chipset-specific optimisation. Qualcomm platform knowledge accelerated simulation, tuning, and verification significantly compared to working from generic documentation.
Contact our team
Joel Mangan
CRO, Sigma Connectivity Inc.
FAQ
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Yes. Design, simulation, OTA testing, RSE measurement, and the full EMC pre-compliance suite run within the same team. This is what no pure antenna vendor and no pure test lab can offer.
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Yes. We cover RSE pre-compliance, the full conducted and radiated EMC suite, and 5G NR OTA testing up to 39 GHz, helping customers resolve issues before reaching an accredited facility.
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Sigma Connectivity specialises in constrained-enclosure and wearable antenna design using full-device 3D simulation, user-position OTA measurement, and integrated EMC verification. See the HMD Secure Ivalo XE above.
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5G (Sub-6 and mmWave to 39 GHz), 4G LTE including Cat-M1 and NB-IoT, 3G, 2G, Wi-Fi 6/6E, Bluetooth, UWB, GNSS, NFC, Zigbee, and ISM-band protocols.
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Passive mode injects RF directly into the antenna via coaxial probe, useful early in development to characterise the antenna alone. Active mode drives the complete device over-the-air and measures TRP and TIS for the full RF system, which are the figures that count for operator approval and type certification.