We work as a prime contractor, a subcontractor, and a fabrication and characterization service, from materials and single devices through tested subsystems. Our core capabilities are below.
Magnetoelectric antennas and arrays, very low frequency (VLF) to ultra-high frequency (UHF)
A conventional antenna must be roughly as large as the wavelength it handles, which makes low-frequency antennas very large. Our magnetoelectric antennas instead sense the magnetic part of a radio wave and convert it into a tiny mechanical vibration and then a voltage, so they resonate at the speed of sound rather than the speed of light. This makes them one to three orders of magnitude smaller than conventional antennas and immune to nearby metal ground planes and the human body. Designs include acoustically driven film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR) and solidly mounted resonator (SMR) elements and multi-element arrays. This work has been featured in Nature and Science and won first prize in the NASA Tech Briefs Create the Future Design Contest.
Very low frequency communication systems
Very low frequency radio, 3 to 30 kilohertz, penetrates seawater, soil, and structures, but a conventional VLF antenna can be hundreds of meters long. Our magnetoelectric mechanical antennas reduce that size by three to five orders of magnitude, making portable and mobile VLF links practical in harsh environments, including underground, undersea, and hypersonic flight.
High-sensitivity magnetic field sensors
We build magnetometers that reach pico-Tesla to femto-Tesla resolution, roughly a million to a billion times weaker than the Earth’s field, without cooling. These are based on magnetoelectric nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) resonators and on low-noise, unbiased ferromagnetic-resonance-driven giant magnetoimpedance (GMI) devices, and they support navigation, detection, and biomedical magnetometry.
Piezoelectric acoustic resonators
We design and fabricate aluminum nitride (AlN) and aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) film bulk acoustic resonators. These resonators are the acoustic engine behind our antennas, filters, and mass-sensitive chemical sensors, converting electrical signals into precise mechanical vibrations on a chip.
Tunable and nonreciprocal RF and microwave components
A jammer or a nearby transmitter can overwhelm a sensitive receiver. We build voltage-tunable filters and phase shifters, isolators, and compact passive frequency-selective limiters that reject co-site interference and jamming, several of them fully passive with no control electronics.
Integrated magnetics for power delivery
The inductors and transformers that regulate power supplies have stayed large even as electronics shrink. We integrate engineered magnetic films into thick spin-spray ferrite components, through-substrate-via (TSV) ferrite inductors and transformers, high-permeability magnetic printed circuit boards (PCBs), and voltage-tunable magnetoelectric inductors, cutting the size and loss of power delivery for compact systems and high-performance computing.
Low-temperature spin-spray ferrite film deposition
Most magnetic ceramics require furnace temperatures that would destroy a finished circuit. Our spin-spray system grows thick, high-permeability ferrite films at below 100 degrees Celsius, directly on many substrates.
- Fast deposition below 100 degrees Celsius, useful to 3 gigahertz
- Wafers up to 12 inches in diameter, thickness up to 50 micrometers
- Substrates including silicon, gallium arsenide, printed circuit board, ceramics, and glass
- Compositions including nickel-zinc, nickel-cobalt-zinc, and manganese-zinc ferrites
- Magnetic PCBs with multilayer ferrite films and a designable relative permeability from 1 to 50 for magnetodielectric antennas
Molecularly imprinted chemical and biomarker sensors
Our molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) sensors are engineered to recognize specific target molecules. We use them for rapid, trace-level detection of chemical vapors, airborne particulates, pathogens, and disease biomarkers, including handheld breathalyzer platforms that read a result from exhaled breath.
Energy harvesting and wireless power
We develop vibration and thermoelectric energy harvesters and wireless power transfer for self-powered and implantable microsystems, so a device can run without a battery or be recharged through the body.
Spintronic materials and devices
We develop spin-orbit torque structures and topological-insulator heterostructures for energy-efficient memory and logic, aimed at computing that uses far less power than today’s transistors.
Additive manufacturing for extreme environments
We design and additively manufacture (3D print) functionally graded radomes for hypersonic vehicles and other ceramic components, producing materials and parts that survive high-temperature environments.