A ferrite nano-particles based fully printed process for tunable microwave components

With the advent of nano-particles based metallic inks, inkjet printing emerged as an attractive medium for fast prototyping as well as for low cost and flexible electronics. However, at present, it is limited to printing of metallic inks on conventional microwave substrates. For fully printed designs, ideally, the substrate must also be printed. In this work, we demonstrate a fully printed process utilizing a custom Fe
₂
O
₃
based magnetic ink for functional substrate printing and a custom silver-organo-complex (SOC) ink for metal traces printing. Due to the magnetic nature of the ink, this process is highly suitable for tunable microwave components. The printed magnetic substrate is characterized for the magnetostatic as well as microwave properties. The measured B(H) curve shows a saturation magnetization and remanence of 1560 and 350 Gauss respectively. As a proof of concept, a patch antenna is implemented in the proposed stack up which shows a tuning range of 4 % around the center frequency.