Low-Cost Direct-Writing of Silver-Based Ink for Planar Microwave Circuits up to 10 GHz
Direct ink writing (DIW) of conductive ink is a printed electronics technology that allows a variety of electronic circuits to be produced in a simple way and with minimal waste of materials. In recent years it has been used for rapid prototyping of RF circuits typically working at S-band frequencie...
| Autores: | , , , , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Fundación para el Fomento de la Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de la Comunitat Valenciana (FISABIO) |
| Repositorio: | r-FISABIO. Repositorio Institucional de Producción Científica |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:fisabio.fundanetsuite.com:p16253 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://fisabio.portalinvestigacion.com/publicaciones/16253 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ink Printing Substrates Conductivity Microwave circuits Printers Ultra wideband antennas Three-dimensional printing Acoustic devices Direct-ink-writing silver-conductive ink additive manufacturing printed electronics ultra-wideband antennas electrical conductivity conductor losses ultrasonic non-destructive testing |
| Sumario: | Direct ink writing (DIW) of conductive ink is a printed electronics technology that allows a variety of electronic circuits to be produced in a simple way and with minimal waste of materials. In recent years it has been used for rapid prototyping of RF circuits typically working at S-band frequencies (2-4 GHz). In an attempt to extend this frequency range while maintaining cost-effective prototyping, this work has focused on proving the feasibility of DIW of silver-conductive (SC) ink for the fabrication of planar microwave circuits beyond 10 GHz, more specifically, ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas for medical applications. For this purpose, the DC and RF performance of the SC ink, as well as the FR4 substrate used, were first evaluated. Based on the comparison between experimental and simulated results, we have found that the effective RF conductivity of the SC ink is approximately 27.6% of its DC value and 3.4% of the copper conductivity. A few test microstrip circuits were fabricated by DIW, namely two S-band filters and one UWB antenna. The overall measured performance of all of them agreed well with simulations. In particular, the DIW antenna exhibited a bandwidth of 8.2 GHz (between 2.4 and 10.6 GHz), and was compared with an identical copper antenna showing that both have very similar characteristics. It was also found that the lower conductivity of SC ink as compared to copper led to a gain reduction of only 0.3 dB. |
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