A high sensitivity planar electric-magnetic isolated sensor for full characterization of magneto-dielectric materials

Magneto-dielectric (MD) materials have received much attention due to their applications in design of high-performance antenna and microwave components. Usually, their permittivity and permeability are key parameters in design of these components. Unfortunately, full characterization of these parameters faces challenge of measurement coupling between permittivity and permeability. To address this issue, an electric and magnetic isolated sensor based on a planar resonance structure is proposed and verified. Several shorting pins are used to separate the electric and magnetic regions, which effectively reduces the measurement coupling between permittivity and permeability. These shorting pins form a magnetic cavity pins (MCP) structure. The resonance structure is used for permittivity measurement, and the MCP structure is designed for measuring permeability with enhanced sensitivity. Moreover, to further improve the quality factor, a metal patch and two 50 Ω chip resistors are integrated on the microstrip line. To extract the imaginary part, the quality factor calculated from S21 will be used. By integrating these techniques, the sensor developed in this paper provides possibility of full characterization of MD materials with high sensitivity. Moreover, the magnetic cavity provides more space than the original design, allowing measurement in the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) range possible. Two sensors are designed and fabricated for validating the sensitivity and accuracy. Several materials with different permittivity and permeability are measured. The extracted measurement values show high agreement with the reference values. The permeability errors for real and imaginary parts are smaller than 3% and 4.5%, respectively. And the permittivity errors are smaller than 2.6% and 6.4%.