A novel CMOS hexaferrite circulator with 25 GHz operating frequency

A novel CMOS hexaferrite circulator with a Y-junction structure is designed and fabricated, which is compatible with standard CMOS technology. The spin-coating approach is adopted during the fabrication, in which the photoresist is mixed with nano-hexaferrite powder for preparation of a magnetic thin film in the device. Compared with the traditional circulator with an external permanent magnet for operation, the novel circulator can utilize the spin-coating magnetic film and is compatible with CMOS technology. The remanent magnetization of the adopted hexaferrite thin film can provide the required magnetic field for reciprocity properties. The optimization of impedance matching and the improvements in the related parameters are demonstrated on the novel CMOS circulator. The CMOS circulator exhibits the merits of small volume and easy integration while keeping its promising non-reciprocity properties. The fabrication is conducted based on the standard 180-nm CMOS technology. S-parameter measurements on the circulator show that the device has an isolation of 20 dB over 520 MHz bandwidth at 26.2 GHz. The minimum insertion loss is 1.81 dB. The novel CMOS-compatible circulator has potential application in 5G wireless communication systems.