IEEE Day Celebration: Better microwave devices with novel materials

Various microwave devices heavily depends on the properties of some materials or on some physical phenomena exhibited by some materials or fabricated structures. For example a dielectric resonator requires materials with high dielectric constant, low dielectric loss and temperature independent dielectric properties. Likewise varactors are possible with thin films of ferroelectrics as they exhibit electric field dependent dielectric constant. The electroacoustic conversion possible with piezoelectric thin films are useful for making miniaturized microwave resonators. In all these the processing of the materials play a crucial role. Also the measurement techniques that are to be employed for extracting the microwave range material properties are interesting especially for thin films. Such devices and phenomena leads to novel devices like magnetless miniaturized circulators and quantum acoustodynamic devices that are needed in quantum computing and other emerging applications. An interesting new addition is the role of magneto electric bilayers. That lead to a host of applications that involves magnetic properties but accessible through electric field, thereby miniaturization is possible. The talk will highlight these aspects with the background of the work done by the speaker’s group at University of Hyderabad.