Broadband Electromagnetic Properties of Engineered Flexible Absorber Materials

Published

August 23, 2023

Author(s)

Luckshitha Suriyasena Liyanage, Connor Smith, Jacob Pawlik, Sarah Evans, Angela Stelson, Chris Long, Nate Orloff, David Arnold, Jim Booth

Abstract

Flexible and stretchable materials have attracted significant interest for applications in wearable electronics and bioengineering fields. Recent developments also incorporate embedded microwave circuits, components, and systems with engineered flexible materials that operate over a broad frequency range (1 to 100 GHz). Here we demonstrate a simple flip-chip technique where flexible materials are placed on top of coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission lines for material property measurement. We apply on-wafer error correction and de-embedding techniques to determine broadband electromagnetic properties of the material-loaded transmission line segments. Finite-element simulations of material-loaded devices were employed along with the broadband measurements to estimate the electromagnetic material properties. To demonstrate this technique, we fabricated flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composites with varying concentrations of barium hexaferrite (BaM) nanoparticles for potential applications in electromagnetic shielding and quantified the complex permittivity and permeability of the composites up to 110 GHz using our broadband technique. We fit the frequency-dependent composite permeability to models describing the ferromagnetic resonance of barium hexaferrite nanoparticles in PDMS and estimate the constituent nanoparticle properties using the Maxwell-Garnett mixing model. This study paves way to exploit a wide range of engineered materials in flexible, wearable, and biomedical electronics applications and presents a convenient methodology to extract important broadband electromagnetic properties of nanoparticles for applications such as electromagnetic shielding.

Citation

Advanced Electronic Materials

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.202300887

Local Download

Keywords

flexible electronics, microwave circuits, barium hexaferrite, PDMS composites, permittivity, permeability

Citation

Suriyasena Liyanage, L. , Smith, C. , Pawlik, J. , Evans, S. , Stelson, A. , Long, C. , Orloff, N. , Arnold, D. and Booth, J. (2023), Broadband Electromagnetic Properties of Engineered Flexible Absorber Materials, Advanced Electronic Materials, [online], https://doi.org/10.1002/admt.202300887, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936537 (Accessed October 10, 2025)