New wave for communications devices

A new computational tool aims to enable development of next-generation communications devices using magnetic materials.

Engineers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed a new tool to model how magnetic materials, which are used in smartphones and other communications devices, interact with incoming radio signals that carry data. It accurately predicts these interactions down to the nanometre scales required to build state-of-the-art communications technologies.

The tool enables engineers to design new classes of RF-based components that are able to transport large amounts of data more rapidly, and with less noise interference. Future use cases include smartphones to implantable health monitoring devices.

When an electromagnetic signal such as a radio wave passes through a magnetic material, the material acts like a gatekeeper, letting in the signals that are desired but keeping out others. The material can also amplify the signal or dampen its speed and strength.

Engineers have used these gatekeeper-like effects, called ‘wave-material interactions’, to make devices used in communications technologies for decades. For example, circulators that send signals in specific directions or frequency-selective limiters that reduce noise by suppressing the strength of unwanted signals.

Current design tools are not comprehensive and precise enough to capture the complete picture of magnetism in dynamic systems, such as implantable devices. The tools also have limits in the design of consumer electronics.

“Our new computational tool addresses these problems by giving electronics designers a clear path toward figuring out how potential materials would be best used in communications devices,” said Yuanxun ‘Ethan’ Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who led the research.

“Plug in the characteristics of the wave and the magnetic material, and users can easily model nanoscale effects quickly and accurately. To our knowledge, this set of models is the first to incorporate all the critical physics necessary to predict dynamic behaviour.”

The study was published in the June 2018 print issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

The computational tool is based on a method that jointly solves Maxwell’s well-known equations, which describe how electricity and magnetism work, and the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation, which describes how magnetisation moves inside a solid object.

The study’s lead author, Zhi Yao, is a postdoctoral scholar in Wang’s laboratory. Co-authors are Rustu Umut Tok, a postdoctoral scholar in Wang’s laboratory, and Tatsuo Itoh, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA and the Northrop Grumman Chair in Electrical Engineering. Itoh is also Yao’s co-advisor.

UCLA Samueli engineers (left to right): Yuanxun ‘Ethan’ Wang, Tatsuo Itoh, Zhi Yao and Rustu Umut Tok. Credit: UCLA Samueli Engineering.

The team is working to improve the tool to account for multiple types of magnetic and non-magnetic materials. These improvements could lead it to become a ‘universal solver’, able to account for any type of electromagnetic wave interacting with any type of material.

Wang’s research group recently received a US$2.4 million grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency to expand the tool’s modelling capacity to include additional material properties.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/sakkmesterke

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Originally published here.