Creating a universal radio frequency front-end for elemental digital beam formed phased arrays

Olsson, Roy H.; Bunch, K. J.; Christal, Gordon; Zhou, Nancy

doi:10.1109/array.2016.7832539

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…The family of PCMs, including vanadium dioxide VO 2 [1], [2] and germanium telluride (GeTe) [3], has the ability to change its state from insulating to metallic via several mechanisms, including local heating and even localized illumination with high energy (UV) light. PCMs have been used to realize reconfigurable RF circuits and antennas based upon switches [4], [5], tunable capacitors [6] and with them, tunable filters [6]. However, these approaches only take advantage of the con-ductivity transition as a switch mechanism in statically-defined distributed circuits and have stopped short of realizing fully programmable conductor geometry for distributed circuits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamically Reconfigurable Microwave Circuits Leveraging Abrupt Phase-Change Material

Connelly,

Chisum

2020

Preprint

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This article proposes a concept for dynamically reconfigurable distributed microwave circuits by leveraging the abrupt conductivity transition in phase-change materials (PCM). Metallic surface-inclusions ( λ) are embedded in the PCM film-vanadium dioxide (VO2)-to provide low-loss and reconfigurability. To validate this concept, a variety of co-planar waveguide transmission lines are designed and fabricated with metallic surface-inclusions in VO2 films, and the lines' performance are characterized up to 50 GHz. The measured results are used to develop a transmission-line based model and an equivalent circuit model of the VO2 with surface-inclusions to aid in the rapid design of new structures. Additionally, an electromagnetic model was developed and indicates that loss can be close to that of conventional metallic distributed circuits with 100 to 200 nm thick VO2 films. With these thicker films, two practical realizations of this concept were designed and simulated: a tunable dipole from 2.13 to 9.07 GHz and a tunable triple-stub matching network from 5 to 40 GHz with high |Γ|. Therefore, the proposed method appears viable for the realization of arbitrary programmable distributed circuits and antennas in the microwave and lowmillimeter-wave bands.

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