Design of electrically tunable phase shifter for antenna arrays operating in Ku-band

This paper deals with the modeling and simulation of a wideband analog phase shifter for Ku applications. The structure adopted is based on a 90° branch-line coupler loaded by varactor diodes used to provide a wide phase shift range. The main idea of this work is to integrate controlled phase shifters in the antenna array in order to control its main beam between different satellites. Several circuits have been tested and optimized using ADS software from Agilent Technologies to obtain a wide bandwidth and wide phase shift range with low insertion loss over the Ku band.