Power handling of a photoconductive microwave switch

Non‐linear characteristics of an optically reconfigurable microwave switch

“…An optically controlled photoconductive microwave switch has been demonstrated [10], where the third-order intercept point (TOIP) was measured as +63 dBm referred to the RF output signal power in a single-tone harmonic non-linearity test with a maximum 1 W RF input power. In [11], input power of 25 W was achieved in a single-tone non-linearity test. This paper shows complete two-tone non-linearity results with 10 W input power per tone which gives excellent performance similar to MEMS devices [5].…”

“…Bottom side illumination through drilled conventional substrates has been shown previously [13]; however, the use of glass substrates minimises the discontinuity introduced into the microstrip line which will become much more important at higher frequencies where optically controlled switching becomes a very attractive technology. Our previous papers [7,11] performed low power, linear characterisation; this paper presents full non-linear characterisation of a switch.…”