Novel Acoustically Actuated Magnetoelectric Antennas

Antenna miniaturization has been a vital issue and has been studied extensively for decades in wireless communication. Instead of relying on electromagnetic wave resonance, which leads to the size of conventional antennas comparable to the electromagnetic wavelength λ
₀
, a novel miniaturized antenna that utilizes the acoustic wave resonance due to magnetoelectric (ME) effect was demonstrated. Comparing with the conventional compact antennas, the proposed ME antennas with a released ferromagnetic / piezoelectric thin-film heterostructures could miniaturize the magnitude in 1-2 orders without performance degradation. In this paper, the fundamental limits on size reduction of conventional antennas are firstly presented. And then a general review of techniques already used in the literature to design miniaturized antennas is given. A section is also devoted to discuss the ME antenna theory and further design to improve the performance with series and parallel antenna arrays. Finally, a comparison of performance between conventional small antennas and novel ME antennas is given.