Integrated Conductivity-Modulation-Based RF Magnetic-Free Non-Reciprocal Components: Recent Results and Benchmarking

Abstract

Achieving non-reciprocity and building nonreciprocal components through spatio-temporal modulation of material properties has attracted a lot of attention in the recent past as an alternative to the more traditional approach of exploiting Faraday rotation in magnetic materials. In this letter, we review recent research on spatio-temporal conductivity-modulation, which enables low-loss, small-footprint, wide-bandwidth and high-power-handling non-reciprocal components operating from radio frequencies (RF) to millimeter-waves (mm-waves) and integrated in a CMOS platform. Four generations of non-reciprocal circulators and circulator-based systems will be reviewed. We will also discuss metrics of performance that are important for wireless applications and standards, and introduce a new antenna (ANT) interface efficiency figure of merit (${\eta }_{ANT}$) to enable a fair comparison between various types of antenna interfaces.

arXiv commentSubmitted to IEEE Antennas AND Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL)

References in corpus (3)

• Nonreciprocal Electromagnetic Scattering from a Periodically Space-Time Modulated Slab and Application to a Quasisonic Isolator
• Optical Isolation based on Space-time Engineered Asymmetric Photonic Bandgaps
• Magnetless Circulators Based on Spatiotemporal Modulation of Bandstop Filters in a Delta Topology

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Dynamic Modulation Yields One-Way Beam Splitting