Tunable liquid crystal phase shifter for microwave frequencies

Abstract

A tunable phase shifter using liquid crystal (LC) is presented. The device is fabricated in a fashion similar to LC displays which makes fabrication very simple compared, for example, to MEMS approaches. At the targeted operation frequency of 20 GHz the device offers a performance of above 60° differential phase shift per dB insertion loss and a minimum tuning speed of 340 ms.