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Omniyig's president William Capogeannis recently shared his thoughts with Microwaves & RF on the importance of YIGS and the evolution of his nearly 40-year-old company. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:
MWRF: Why YIGS?
WC: I pursued the design and manufacturing of yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) devices, as the YIG resonator can replace many mechanically tunable microwave components. It makes for a YIG device of very small, very lightweight footprint with a reliable meantime between failure of more than 200,000 hours. YIG resonators also support multi-octave tuning in a single package.
There is a broad requirement of electronically tuned microwave components needed for use in numerous systems: radar, telecommunications, countermeasure, guidance, microwave receivers, and much more. The YIG device is the only electronically tunable microwave component element that we can design for those systems that is tuned in octave and multi-octave bandwidths.
Initially, the development of magnetically tunable microwave YIG filters using single crystal yttrium-iron-garnet resonators came from a report prepared for the U.S. Army Research and Development Laboratory at Fort Monmouth, NJ. That marked the beginning of my education on YIG filters/YIG oscillators, with my designing front-end tuners with mechanically tunable filters for ECM systems at Loral Electronics, Bronx River Ave. in 1963. At that point, I started designing the very first YIG filters to be used in the military program system of the ALR-20. After the government's successful use of three systems with the YIG filters, all future systems of the like were designed with YIG devices.
With YIG material, we can manufacture these...