ABSTRACT
This chapter presents design, analysis, fabrication and measurement of another version of a 5-bit phase shifter using distributed microelectromechanical systems transmission line (DMTL) topology is. The DMTL phase shifter works on the principle of dispersion where an unloaded line is loaded with multiple distributed capacitances in a periodic manner. To improve the loss of the overall phase shifter in higher-bit configurations, metal–air–metal (MAM) or metal–insulator–metal capacitors are used in the literature. A phase shifter is built with three fixed-to-fixed beams; one is switchable with electrostatic actuation and the other two are fixed for a MAM capacitor. The unit cell phase shifter, individual primary phase bits and complete 5-bit phase shifter were fabricated using the same surface micromachining process. Reliability measurement on the 5-bit phase shifter was carried out under cold-switched conditions and with different temperature variation.
