M-FLOCC: Microwave Floquet Circulator Chip with sub-ns reconfigurability

M-FLOCC is a 65 nm CMOS Microwave Floquet Circulator Chip designed for full-duplex communication in the microwave band from 5-6GHz. The chip leverages time-modulated resonators to realize a chip-scale microwave circulator—a three-port device that is critical for enhancing communication efficiency and speed. In contrast, conventional microwave circulators without time modulation typically remain bulky, at the centimeter scale, as they use ferrite resonators and permanent magnets. Our prototype operates in the 5–6 GHz band with a compact 1 mm2 footprint. Measurements show isolation levels exceeding 25 dB and demonstrate sub-nanosecond reconfigurability, enabling real-time tuning of microwave system functionalities. Looking forward, this device lays the foundation for monolithic microwave full-duplex communication chips with embedded intelligence to adapt dynamically to complex electromagnetic environments.

Design Team: M-FLOCC is designed and measured by external page Lab of Wave Engineering at EPFL (Zhe Zhang, Zhechen Zhang, Alireza Mafi, Junda Wang, Prof. Romain Fleury) with the helps from EPFL EDA (Alexandre Levisse, Robin Leplae). The whole project is supervised by Prof. Romain Fleury.

Paper: "Ultrafast reconfigurable microwave Floquet circulator chip”" manuscript under preparation, 2025.

Key Features: Microwave; Three-port circulator; Isolation> 25 dB; Insertion losses=8dB. Sub-ns reconfigurability; 1 mm2; CMOS 65 nm.

Application: Microwave full-duplex communication with simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency.