Radiated efficiency of aperture tuned antennas: Comparison of MEMS Digital Variable Capacitor and fixed ceramic capacitors

Aperture tuned antennas are becoming more common in Smart Phone Handsets to address radiated efficiency issues caused by industrial design constraints and increased frequency requirements. This paper focuses on a real application example of a MEMS Digital Variable Capacitor (DVC) from Cavendish Kinetics in antenna aperture tuning. The OTA performance is bench-marked against using state-of-the-art fixed-valued discrete capacitors in place of the DVC, showing similar radiation efficiency between the two. These results directly show how the low loss and low parasitics of the MEMS DVC can enable antenna aperture tuning applications.