A magnetic nano-particle ink for tunable microwave applications

Abstract

Inkjet printing or printing for realization of inexpensive and large area electronics has unearthed as an attractive fabrication technique. Though at present, mostly the metallic inks are printed on regular microwave substrates. In this paper, a fully printed multilayer fabrication process is demonstrated where the substrate is also realized through printing. A novel Fe2O3 based magnetic ink is used as a substrate while an in-house silver organo complex (SOC) ink is developed for metallic layers. Complete magnetostatic and microwave characterization of the ink is presented. At the end, a tunable patch antenna is shown as an application using the magnetic ink as the substrate. The antenna shows a tuning range of 12.5 % for a magnetic field strength of 3 kOe.