Ku band DMTL medium power phase shifters

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 90deg and 180deg DMTL sections operating at 15 GHz is shown. For these respective configurations, phase shifts of 89.3deg and 178deg have been observed and validate this conception. With reasonable loss of 60deg/dB, these devices are among the first MEMS based phase shifter in literature able to operate at such power level in hot switching conditions.