Multiferroic Materials for RF Applications

Built upon the progress in Phase I period, Winchester Technologies, LLC is pleased to propose to investigate practical magnetoelectric antennas during the Phase II period based on solidly mounted resonators (SMR), which will have enormous impacts on DoD and civilian antenna applications. State of the art antennas suffer from three major open challenges: (1) large antenna size > ?0/10, (2) antenna impedance mismatch; (3) ground plane effect. The proposed acoustically actuated ME antennas solves all three open challenges at the same time. The PI’s are the first and only team to demonstrate ultra-compact acoustically actuated RF magnetoelectric antennas with their size comparable to the acoustic wavelength, instead of their electromagnetic wave length ?0. This ME antenna design, albert demonstrated to show high gain at small size, suffers from limited power handling, and difficulty in scaling to larger sizes. Here we propose to investigate novel solidly mounted RF NEMS ME antennas on acoustic Bragg lattice, which are ME antennas with orders magnitude enhanced power handling, high gain, compact size, and ground plane immunity, and are much better than both the SoA compact antennas and the SoA ME antennas with one order of magnitude smaller size, but comparable antenna performance.