RF Breakthrough: Non-magnetic circulators

[simcop2387]

Looks like some researchers have made what could be an almost holy grail type device for RF communications: A non-magnetic circulator.

The press release makes it look pretty impressive and it looks like it's made entirely of passives plus a frequency generator that sets up a wave inside the circulator itself to take the place of the magnetics.   If anyone can get a hold of the nature article I'd love to hear more about how it actually works.  Given that it looks like it's not using any exotic materials either it might even be possible to put it into an IC.

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2014/11/10/radio-wave-device-alu/
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3134.html

[ConKbot]

Looks neat!
 However from the first article...

“We envision micron-sized circulators embedded in cellphone technology. When you consider cellphone traffic during high demand events such as a football game or a concert, there are enormous implications opened by our technology, including fewer dropped calls and clearer communications

seems a bit optimistic.  The same poor service with half as many towers/sectors is probably more like it.

[simcop2387]

Yea I'm not optimistic about it for cell service but I do think it'd probably work really well for WiFi or other short distance scenarios.  I have no idea how this would play with MIMO devices though since there's separate antennas that would possibly interfere with the function of the circulator.  I'd also think this could enable some much better ISM band low power rf transcievers.  Imagine having a full duplex 433mhz transceiver without having to use more bandwidth and/or negotiating which frequencies/channels to use.  Bluetooth could probably make some real headway with that also getting better latency since there's no contention on the media for full duplex audio.

[T3sl4co1l]

Neato!

Looks pretty easy to build, even without the full article.  Not hard to optimize in simulation; downside is you can only get the nonlinearity in transient sim, so you'll have to set up all your AC analysis tools in the time domain.

Tim

[David Hess]

It looks like they used varactors as the modulating element.  I wonder how its performance compares to existing active circulators which can be wideband.

[DenzilPenberthy]

PM me with email address and I'll send you a pdf.

[s1sp32]

 that's  Neato!!!

Of course it's great in terms of designing full-duplex radio transceiver especially in the metric and submetric frequency range. For first sight I also thought that pretty easy to build , but in real not. Maybe anyone build simulation model or can understand what is the problem on my model?  Could  anyone send the simulation file?

Please find attached AWR Microwave Office simulation files