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In this letter, development of a low-loss radio frequency (RF) microelectromechanical (MEMS) 4-bit X-band monolithic phase shifter is presented. These microstrip circuits are fabricated on 0.021-in-thick high-resistivity silicon and are based on a reflection topology using 3-dB Lange couplers. The average insertion loss of the circuit is 1.4 dB with the return loss >11 dB at 8 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is a lowest reported loss for X-band phase shifter and promises to greatly reduce the cost of designing and building phase arrays.

As the need for low-loss phase shifters increases, so does the interest in radio frequency (RF) MEMS as a solution to provide them. In this paper, progress in building low loss Ka-band phase shifters using RF MEMS capacitive switches is demonstrated. Using a switched transmission line 4-bit resonant phase shifter, an average insertion loss of 2.25 dB was obtained with better than 15-dB return loss. A similar 3-bit phase shifter produced an average insertion loss of 1.7 dB with better than 13-dB return loss. Both devices had a phase error of less than 13 in the fundamental states. To our knowledge, these devices represent the lowest loss Ka-band phase shifters reported to date.

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