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Advance Superconducting Ferroelectric Tuned Microwave Filters Project Summary The superconductivity research at Birmingham University is well-known and is at the forefront in Europe on the invention, production and application of new superconducting materials and devices. It is expected that researchers at Swinburne Sarawak will gain expertise and experience in microwave superconductivity research through this collaboration following the research grant input supported by the scheme. The novelty of this project will be the design of microwave filters itself, which can be electrically tuned by integrating ferroelectric materials in the design. New ideas and new methodologies of implementing the filter together with the sophisticated biasing network will be investigated. Ferroelectric is a material with high dielectric permittivity and the permittivity changes with an applied dc bias voltage. Following recent advancement of fabrication technology, monolithically compatible processing of ferroelectric thin-film compounds with superconducting materials has generated great interest for designing a new class of tunable microwave devices. It is an excellent candidate for low cost frequency agile devices. The new filters are expected to show good performance, with minimum insertion loss and high tunability. The end product shall be a miniature and properly packaged filter. Superconducting tunable microwave filters have relevance to many areas and mobile communication systems seem to be one of the first that will be able to use these filters. To-date, there are very few high performance ferroelectric tunable filters, mainly due to complicated filter design and high dielectric loss tangent of ferroelectric materials. The outcomes of this project will provide a deep insight into the performance of superconducting ferroelectric tuned filters for microwave applications. The funding also supports researchers to buy basic equipments and facilities to start-up microwave research within the school. |