Design and modeling of reconfigurable MEMS low pass filter

This paper presents the design and modeling of a unit cell for reconfigurable microwave microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) low pass filters (LPF), with reconfigurable inductance and capacitance. Lumped elements are introduced here to approximate the characteristics of the distributed filters, and then optimization is performed to obtain the superior characteristics as needed. LPFs with arbitrary cut-off frequency between 10GHz to 30GHz can be optimized corresponding to this model. Using this prototype, the reconfigurable LPF has a cut-off frequency switching from 7.8GHz to 15.3GHz, with ripple below 2dB and out-of-band rejection better than 40dB in both states, which demonstrates the validation of the proposed model