Small, High Performance Circulators Based on Ferrite Materials Compatible with MMIC

The Navy needs innovative T/R modules to achieve performance enhancement, cost reduction, decreased size and MMIC integration. New techniques compatible with RF MMIC fabrication in Gallium Nitride (GaN) on silicon carbide (SiC) to form a purely passive circulator for S-Band operation and radar applications with a nominal bandwidth of 1.5 GHz are required. The process must be compatible with wafer-level semiconductor device fabrication and be consistent with automated integrated circuit fabrication and assembly. Metamagnetics, in partnership with a MMIC foundry will perform the research needed to develop small, passive, self-biased, S-band circulators based on ferrite material and advanced circulator design to reduce the size of the circulator and enable integration at the MMIC level. Reducing the size of the circulators not only enhances performance through the reduction of parasitics, but offers the potential to increase the density of arrays in future radar systems.Air and Missile Defense Radar is the primary transition platform for this technology and we will develop a roadmap to the transition of our MMIC-compatible circulator into foundry processes used to build AMDR T/R modules