Microwave Ceramics
- Oxide dielectrics have revolutionized the wireless communications industry by reducing the size and cost of frequency filters and oscillators. Commercially viable "microwave ceramics" must have a high dielectric constant, low dielectric loss in the microwave region, and temperature stability of their resonant frequency. Only a handful of oxides have thus far been identified with the requisite properties.
- Our research is aimed toward understanding what aspects of the structure and chemistry of these systems are important in mediating their microwave response. Our principal focus is to understand the role of cation order-disorder and other related structural phenomena and to utilize these insights to develop a new generation of materials. We have also begun work to identify new low sintering temperature systems.
- The publications listed below provide more information on our work and deal with systems that are widely used in current wireless technologies (perovskites, zirconium titanates, barium rare earth titanates), as well as those that are not currently in use may be capable of producing higher levels of performance. In addition to these publications our group has presented invited and contributed papers at many national and international scientific meetings.
- This work has been funded by industry (e.g. Ericsson Radio Access), by federal sources (National Science Foundation). and the State of Pennsylvania supported Benjamin Franklin Program. It also involves collaborations with a number of other research groups including, for example, Dr. Tyke Negas at TCI Ceramics Inc., Dr.'s Bob Roth and Terrell Vanderah at NIST, and Dr.'s Dani Suvorov and Matjaz Valant at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia.