The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 12, 2006
Filed:
Feb. 03, 2004
Frank Crowne, Laurel, MD (US);
Steve C. Tidrow, Silver Spring, MD (US);
Frank Crowne, Laurel, MD (US);
Steve C. Tidrow, Silver Spring, MD (US);
The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Army, Washington, DC (US);
Abstract
A delay line is made by sandwiching a thin slice of ferroelectric between two 'cladding' layers of relatively low-ε, low loss material to form a dielectric slab waveguide, and may support the propagation of electromagnetic guided waves and hence be used as a source of electric-field tunable time delay. There is a frequency range within which a dielectric-slab delay line behaves like a homogeneous transmission line with an 'average' dielectric constant that is much lower than that of the ferroelectric, thereby ameliorating the difficulty with the high dielectric constant of the ferroelectric material. The thin slice of ferroelectric material “expels” a large fraction of the wave electric field, causing most of it to occupy the low-loss cladding material, greatly reducing the propagation loss along the delay line while allowing delay time to be varied by applying an electric-field through the ferroelectric within the cladding structure.