Ku band DMTL medium power phase shifters

Abstract

-The first part of this paper deals with curled shunt capacitive MEMS switched varactors with good power handling capabilities. These devices have been able to achieve 1 billion cycles under 5 W in hot switching conditions. These cantilevers have been used as switched capacitors periodically loaded along a Coplanar Wave Guide (CPW) line to form a Distributed MEMS Transmission Line (DMTL) phase shifter. In the second part, the integration of these beams in 90° and 180° DMTL sections operating at 15 GHz is shown. For these respective configurations, phase shifts of 89.3° and 178° have been observed and validate this conception. With reasonable loss of 60°/dB, these devices are among the first MEMS based phase shifter in literature able to operate at such power level in hot switching conditions.