This letter presents the fabrication and measurement of a novel loaded line phase shifter design providing four different phase shifts using only two RF MEMS switches. The flexibility of choosing DC or capacitive load depending upon the phase shift required in a single RF MEMS switch makes the phase shifter compact and requires less number of proposed switches. The RF MEMS switch has been designed to provide isolation better than 10 dB in both DC and capacitive states from 16 to 45 GHz. Due to the designed RF MEMS beam switching between DC and capacitive loading, the proposed phase shifter provides a 2-bit phase shift using only two switches. The measured phase shifter has the maximum insertion loss of 0.8 dB with a bandwidth of 8 GHz from 16 to 24 GHz. The return loss is better than 10 dB for all four states. The maximum Root-Mean-Square (RMS) insertion loss error is 0.28 dB, and the phase shift error is 0.98 • . The proposed phase shifter is fabricated using the surface micromachining on the sapphire substrate and occupies an area of 3.931 mm 2 .

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This article reports a compact Power Divider design employing a combination of a capacitive load and Defect Grounded Structures (DGS) on GaAs substrate for MMIC technology in the C band. The integration of these two techniques offers a compact power divider with a decrease in quarter-wave transmission line length from λ/4 to λ/16 and harmonic suppression up to 50 GHz. Capacitive loading reduces the size, and DGS improves harmonic suppression and further decreases the size of the structure. The designed power divider is simulated in Ansys HFSS 19.2 and provides a return loss of 25.66 dB, with an insertion loss of 3.01 dB at 5.4 GHz and isolation of 13.37 dB. Isolation is further improved to 30.89 dB using a parallel combination of resistor and capacitor in the isolation network. The prototype of the proposed circuit has been fabricated using RT/duroid ® 5880 as substrate. Measurement results show insertion loss and return loss of 3.02 and 23.46 dB. Isolation of 22.43 dB was achieved. The proposed design provides a size reduction of 73.7% with harmonic suppression up to 10th harmonics by 10 dB, making it suitable for high-performance monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC).

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