This dissertation investigates how to design and fabricate low cost, lightweight, and re- congurable RF and microwave electronics using additive manufacturing and nanomagnetic materials. A key goal is to provide a specic methodology on obtaining high performance RF electronics by taking advantage of the expanded design freedom, economic fabrication process oered by the additive manufacturing technology, as well as the unique microwave properties of the magnetic nanomaterials. A number of commonly used RF and microwave electronics are designed, fabricated, and measured to demonstrate that we have successfully achieved such goal. The performance tradeos of the above two approaches during experi- mental implementation are also discussed for each specic circuit and component category, depending on the corresponding desired performance. This in turn provides us with practi- cal and important comments regarding the limitations of our approaches. Therefore, we can obtain an insightful guideline for achieving our key goal in terms of both design potentials and implementation capabilities. The rst chapter addresses the current trend of smaller, smarter, and cheaper electronics which motivates our work in this dissertation. The second chapter provides the background on additive manufacturing technology and magnetic mate- rials that were utilized as two separate approaches to achieve high performance and low cost RF and microwave applications prior to this work. Based on such context, we are motivated to propose a new thrust which pushes the boundaries beyond the current development of both approaches and explores the new realm of combining them together. The third chapter introduces several types of additive manufacturing techniques, and presents a number of lightweight, recongurable, and high performance RF components that are developed using one or two techniques and in a combined manner. Manufacturing factors that negatively aects the RF performance are analyzed and discussed with the corresponding technique to alleviate such issue. In chapter four, we study the fundamental properties of the mag- netic materials and explore the potential of using the magnetic nanomaterials fabricated by novel chemical methods in microwave applications operating at frequencies higher than a traditional range. The magnetic nanoparticle thin lms were fabricated using various com- posites and were characterized for high frequency RF applications. Chapter ve expands our work by combining the additive manufacturing technology, magnetic nanoparticle lms, and liquid crystal polymer substrate to develop low cost, miniaturized, and recongurable RF components with compact and lightweight packages. The fabrication process is optimized by considering the practical limitations from chapter two, and enhanced RF performances are obtained in several applications. However, tradeos due to the magnetic materials are also observed, which are then theoretically analyzed and veried by the measurement re- sults. Our work has successfully demonstrated how the RF and microwave components and circuits can be made as low cost, compact, and lightweight with enhanced performance using additive manufacturing and magnetic nanomaterials. Future work will continue by explor- ing new design capabilities and optimizing the fabrication process to further improve the performance while reducing the overall fabrication cost.
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